


It Takes More Than Whiskey to Make That Flower Bloom: A Drabble Collection

by objectlesson



Series: Drabble Collections [1]
Category: Cars (Pixar Movies)
Genre: Age Difference, Butch/Femme, F/F, Humanized Cars, Lesbians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2020-10-17 13:07:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 36
Words: 27,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20621522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: A collection of f/f Doc McQueen Drabbles.





	1. fade into darkness

**Author's Note:**

> Check each chapter for a list of appropriate tags/warnings for the subsequent content! 
> 
> First one: mentions of lesbophobia and use of the word "dyke" (not as a slur but in an internal monologue about heterosexism?)

You’ve been very nearly ignoring her all night. 

Not because you want to–more than anything, you want to be home, your hands sliding up the wide-legs of her crisp, pleated, high-waisted trousers to raze nails over the newly shaven smoothness of her legs. You want to be _near_ her, and that’s the problem. She’s _impossible_ at these sorts of press events, always soaking up attention, preening for the camera, pushing out her chest in her low-cut black top with the criss-cross straps. She _glows _with all that attention on her, and you can’t trust yourself around Lightning McQueen when she’s glowing. It reminds you too much of how she looks in your bed, how she looks with her legs spread over your hips as she rides you, how she looks when she’s close and her hair is everywhere and she’s _forgotten_ her good angles, because nothing matters but being your good girl. 

So, when there’s a spotlight, you fade into the background. She’s dangerous to be around: if you get too close, you’ll catch fire. Everyone will _know_ what NASCAR’S lesbian it-girl is doing with her old dyke crew-chief, and they’ll come for her. It’s fine, right now, when the world is in love with her just like you are. It’s fine, when she’s young and golden, when she comes out of the roll-cage after a win with her red lips and shiny blonde hair tumbling over her shoulders and the crowd explodes because she’s so _good, _she’s so fast, she’s so beautiful, that they don’t _care_ she’s gay. She’s feminine enough the men still want her, and the women still admire her, and so she still sells shirts and posters and mudflaps in the midwest. That’s all that matters. 

The second anyone suspects it’s _you_ who gets to touch her, the whole thing does up in smoke. She’s dirtied to them, sullied. She’s one of _those_ lesbians. Not the plastic, airbrushed porn-bodies with their French manicures and fake moans. She’s real. She goes home to someone who looks like you, she falls to her knees and grinds herself off on your boot, she calls you daddy. You are the thing who can destroy the fantasy of her, the illusion of her, because you have _never_ been the sort of woman who can pass as anything other than you are. 

So you have to keep your distance. Otherwise, your love will show, and everyone will _see, _and the whole thing comes crumbling down. No shirts, no posters, no mudflaps. 

She finds you later, in the bathroom. She smells like champagne and she has lipstick on her teeth, and you can’t help but reach for her, hold her steady while you thumb up the smudge of red from her incisor. “Having fun, baby girl?” you murmur, because no one is in here but the two of you. 

She pouts and sways closer, so her tits brush across your ribcage teasingly. “I miss you,” she says, hooking a manicured thumb into your belt-loop, frowning. “You look so fucking hot tonight. Love this suit on you.” 

You fix her hair for her, mouth watering at the way her blue eyes close, mascara thick lashes fluttering against her make up glittery cheek. “Tonight, once we’re at the hotel. I’ll undress you, and keep this old thing on. You can get in my lap while I wear it. That sound good?” 

“Fuck, _fuck!” _she hisses, throwing her head back and making a face, stumbling in her heels because she’s tipsy and you make her even dizzier. “You’re so mean. I cannot believe you’re gonna say this shit to me _now_ when I have…” she checks her watch, and sticks her tongue out. “_Two_ more hours at least of schmoozing. M’gonna mess up my underwear. And I’m wearing _good_ ones tonight.” 

“Show me later,” you tell her, studying her face in that stern way that makes her listen. 

“This is cruel and unusual,” she whines. 

“Just two more hours, baby. Ok? I’m sorry,” you say then, and you _are, _you’re so sorry. You wish the whole world could know about the two of you, you _wish_ you would work the room together, two legends of racing, two generations of women who refused to play by the rules. But just because the world is kinder now doesn’t mean it’s kind enough to walk out into, Lightning McQueen clinging to your arm, hanging on your every word, ready to suck your fingers or sink to her knees or flip her skirt up in back so you can see the lace she wears for you. You lean in and kiss her hard, as an apology. 

She moans into your mouth and holds you in place stubbornly, gets her lipstick all over your mouth. “Make it up to me later,” she says, making a fist around your tie and jerking it, blue eyes flashing. 

You squeeze her hip, before pushing her away. “Promise.” 


	2. never enough

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tags: pining, unrequited (but not really??)

Lightning wins the Grand Prix she was ranked 4th in the nation for. Her reputation is soaring, and it’s _all_ because of her _team, _her crew chief. 

Her fucking _fucking crew chief. _

Doc takes them all to a bar to celebrate, and she’s still nursing her first shot of whiskey while everyone else is onto their second, their third. Lightning sidles up with her fourth in hand, wrist tilted so she spills inelegantly on herself as she collapses against Doc, fitting herself against the broad stretch of her chest. Her tits, presumably. 

It’s hard to _tell, _what her tits are like under the mens button ups and oversized sweaters she wears. Lightning always wonders, but she wonders _especially _when she’s drunk. _Especially_ when she’s cajoled Doc into a hug and gets to be pressed against her solidity in a crowded bar, hands curious against her harsh angles, her secret curves. Everything she wants but won’t ever get beyond moments like this. “Hello,” she slurs, laying her head on doc’s shoulder. “I know you hate cuddles but. I won because of you and m’drunk _so. _Here I am.” 

“I don’t hate cuddles,” Doc tells her incredulously, raising a salt and pepper eyebrow. “What makes you think that?” 

“Um.” Lightning says. “You always shove me off when I try?” 

Doc smiles, then frowns. Then she looks away, absently to where the TV is broadcasting Lightning’s win over and over again. “I guess I do, don’t I?” 

“Yeah,” Lightning pouts, wrapping her arms around Doc’s straight back, taking advantage when she can. 

Lightning always hated slow dancing with boys, which is the extent of her contact with them at all, really. Since a few failed experiments in high school it’s always been women: slim models with their curved spines, the pretty young things that throw themselves at her after she’s won a race, not sure if they want her or want to be her. But Doc…Doc isn’t that sort of woman. She’s a woman, all right, perhaps the _most_ purely and truly woman of them all, with her un-plucked upper lip and worn in denim she hasn’t replaced since the 70s. She’s _strong, _though. Broad and calloused and immovable like a mountain, like a tree, like a desert. Lightning likes to wrap her arm around her and hold on, wishing she never had to let go. She sways and ducks and laughs, knowing she’ll stay here, tethered to stability. She tries it all the time, but Doc usually unlatches her, sends her away like a child. Not tonight, though, for some reason. So she holds on tighter, rubs her face into clean cotton. “Buy me another drink?” she murmurs quietly, wondering if this is the _night_, the night Doc _finally_ fucking breaks. Lightning has been wearing her down every since she decided to stay in Radiator Springs, flirting for so long she _knows_ Doc’s not interested. But there’s always room for loneliness to win out against whatever it is that’s keeping her so impenetrable. And if Lighting knows anything, it’s how to win a long race. 

Doc laughs, cuffs the back of her head gently, fingers snagging in blonde hair. “Don’t get too big for your britches, sweetheart,” she scolds, finally taking Lightning by the shoulders and gently pushing her off. “You’ve had enough.” 

_Sweetheart_ twists low and hot and needy in Lightning’s gut, and she suddenly doesn’t feel drunk _enough_. It fucking sucks, that she could have any girl she wanted, any repressed southern NASCARfan, any money-hungry promoter who _thought_ she was straight but is second guessing her whole history the second Lightning leaves a lipstick print on her neck. She can break hearts, and unhook bras blind with a single hand. 

But she can’t have Doc, because Doc doesn’t want her. She’s not old enough, not pretty enough, not rough enough, not quiet enough not…not something. She purses his lips together, and stumbles back into the crowd. “Haven’t had _enough_ actually,” she calls over the din, weaving messily, gaze fixed on Doc’s ice blue eyes all the while. _Never enough,_ she thinks, heart tight with longing. “Gonna buy my_self_ another, Grandma.” 


	3. hurt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags: more pining! Takes place during Cars, pre-slash.

Lightning’s neck hurts. Her back hurts. Her _face_ hurts from hitting the steering wheel when she vaulted down the hill and got stuck in _cacti_ because Doc _whatever the fuck_ her name is is probably a sadist who violated the hippocratic _oath. _It would be _just_ her luck that this evil woman with her silver hair and square jaw and calloused hands, this woman who’s the town judge and doctor would _also, _somehow, be good at racing hotrods in the dirt like a freaking magician_. _She rolls over, groaning, gaze fixed on the vaulted ceiling of her room at the Cozy Cone. It’s been the shittiest few days. 

They would have been be less shitty, somehow, if the prime source of all her misery wasn’t _so fucking hot. _

_Like, _Lightning thinks she might be able to handle having been humiliated by some older lady if she wasn’t _also_ the goddamned butch of her dreams. She didn’t even know she _had_ a butch of her dreams. She was totally happy fucking brand endorsement girls and fans and aspiring models, but _damn. _That was before she had Doc Hudson tell her she was gonna throw her in jail and let her rot. That was before she flew off a cliff and wedged her race car between a bunch of saguaros. That was before she _knew better. _

Ligtning’s neck hurts. Her back hurts. And till, she wants to get fucking _railed_out of her mind by the same woman who made he’s _crash her car_ this morning. 

“I’m a masochist,” she moans, voice muffled by her own hands spread wide over the flush of her face. It’s a plea, maybe. Unsurprisingly, no one answers. 


	4. rituals

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags: strap on sex.

There’s nothing more thrilling in the whole world than lying in Doc’s bed with her legs spread, hands twisting sheets in anticipation while she watches her strap her dick on. 

It’s like, _holy. _

It’s not like Lightning has never been fucked before. She totally has. She’s done the fucking, too. A girl she picked up at a bar one time in Tulsa had one, it was purple, with a nylon lavender harness. They traded off all night, and that was before she was even _famous_. After that she got one _herself, _of course, because most of the fans she charmed into her bed were too inexperienced with girls to do anything else but lie there and get railed, really, which was fine because she loved rocking their worlds. 

She’s not sure why it’s so goddamned different with Doc, why it feels like a revelation. But is _is, _and it _does. _

There’s something positively _ritualistic_ about the way Doc puts it on, the careful, thoughtful manner in which she pulls the straps up over her hips and tightens them, the way her wrinkled skin dimples under the leather. The way no one could ever _laugh_ at her because she’s regal, she’s strong, she’s frightening, or, she would be, if she weren’t so tender. “God,” Lightning murmurs two fingers shoved deep inside herself, pumping in and out just shy of her clit because she doesn’t want to push her body too close. “You’re so fucking hot.” 

“Me?” Doc says, raising an eyebrow and looking at Lightning with mock surprise on her face even though she _knows, _she knows. What she does to her, how bad she _needs_ it. She knows and he tells Lightning all about how she knows, breath hot, voice low and gravely and scraping against the shell of her ear as she reminds her how wet she is, hot good she takes it, how pretty she looks with her knees by her ears. 

“Yeah, you,” Lightning purrs, pulling her fingers out and holding them up to the light so they can both see how she’s glistening. “See what you do to me?” 

Doc clambers carefully, methodically onto the bed. Then she situates herself between Lightning’s thighs, pushing them apart, looking right at her where she’s split and pulsing. “Yeah, I see. So pretty and pink, god, my babygirl,” she groans, expression flickering into something broken and moves as she thumbs over Lightning’s clit, makes her buck and writhe. “You gonna let me fuck you?” 

“Please,” Lightning begs, tilting her head back, strands of her long blonde hair catching on the swollen pout of her mouth. “Please.” 

And when Doc holds her tight and teases her with the tip of it before slowly, sinking in on an exhale, _that’s_ holy too. Lightning’s face crumples and she hides it in the ditch of Doc’s neck and shoulder, hand coming to scrub up through her close-cropped silver hair. Her hips rock, and the sound that comes out of her is like prayer. 


	5. anything goes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for Doc being rigid and traditional and self deprecating, and use of the d slur

They’re in San Francisco, and Lightning is _begging_ to go to some girl’s night at a trashy gay club in the Castro.

“Absolutely not,” Doc tells her, crossing her arms over her chest decisively while Lightning lolls around on a hotel bed, pouting. “What if someone sees and recognizes you? You’re not _actually_ out. Remember, you have to keep them guessing.” 

“Doc. Lesbians don’t like NASCAR. We’re like, the only ones, I promise that crowd will just see me and check out my ass in the jeans m’gonna wear, ok? C’monnn, I haven’t made out with a girl in like, twenty five years.” 

Doc frowns. Of the two of them, _she_ is the one who hasn’t kissed a woman in that long. Maybe even longer. She studies Lightning, wonders if she’ll realize how insensitive she was being in saying that and catch herself, apologize, but she never does. She just stares back with wide blue eyes, glossy lower lip pushed out expectantly. Doc hates it. She wants to grab her, wants to say _has it ever occurred to you that you could be swimming in kisses if you took your head out of your ass long enough to see me as a viable option instead of chasing straight, stupid, midwestern fans of yours? _It’s an absurd thing to think, though. Lightning will never see her as a viable option because she’s _not. _She’s far too old for her and she’s traditional to the point of rigidity and even though plenty of women found her attractive, and still do, she’s not _pretty. _Not pretty in the way Lightning likes her girls pretty.

“I dunno, kid. I think it’s a lot to risk for a single night out,” she eventually says, rubbing her chin with her knuckles. 

Lightning goes boneless and flops onto the bed with a groan. “Doc, you’re _killing me. _I gotta go out, just like, _once, _or I’ll explode in the roll-cage.” 

“Who’s gonna keep you from getting too drunk and fucking up your race tommorow?” 

Lightning’s face get bright, her eyes flashing. “How about you come with me?!” 

“What!?” Doc barks, bristling at the mere idea. “No.”

The only thing worse than Lightning spending the whole night making out with some girl is having to _watch_ her do it. Doc doesn’t think her heart could actually withstand such a thing. She would _much_ rather drink herself into a pit of numbness and resignation here at the hotel room if Lighting’s gonna go out.

“No, think about it! Maybe there will be some hot older lady there for you and we can _both_ get lucky. Like some lonely milf looking to be turned out,” Lightning offers and waggles her eyebrows, like she actually thinks that’s the type of woman who frequents these things, or the type of woman Doc wants in the first place. 

Doc snorts. “Dunno if you’ve been to any lesbian bars lately, but I can guarantee you I will not find what I’m looking for at the type of place you’re trying to drag me to.” She does not tell Lightning that she already found what she’s looking for. 

Or, it found her. Tracked her down to her court room, her garage, her clinic, her town, tucked away in miles and miles of desert. It found her in the middle of nowhere and it _stayed. _ And now it’s staring back at her: Lightning begging her to come out into the lion’s den so she can watch her grind on some twenty something who looks just like her, because Lightning is vain and _always_ hooks up with girls who look just like her. And somewhere, in the shadows behind her, Doc gets a little older, little grayer. 

“Um, when was the last time _you_ went to a lesbian bar? The 50s? Trust me, things are different now, they’re like…looser. You see all types, ok? Like, anything goes, these days.” Lightning explains, talking as if she’s an expert and not some young, arrogant girl from the bible belt. It should hurt, and it does. But mostly Doc just loves her. Her bravado, her stupidity, her innocence, her fear. The way she refuses to let it take the wheel. 

Doc shakes her head. The thing is, she knows Lightning’s right, and that’s _part _of why she doesn’t want to go, why she _can’t. _Why fear feels _different_ for her. 

For Doc, being at gay clubs doesn’t feel like her _community_ anymore. It feels like attending a party she doesn’t know anyone at, it feels like trying to swim drunk in a pool full of seething, sweating bodies. In her day, being gay used to mean loving women: sacrificing the safety and comfort of life as you knew it just to touch one in the dark. Gay bars were refuges for people just like her: working class people who hated cops and just wanted a place to take their girlfriend or boyfriend out for a night of dancing, to dress how they wanted, kiss who they wanted. Being gay was something concrete, something absolute.

But now, it seems like it’s an idea, to some people. A style instead of a lifestyle, a political orientation instead of an indicator of _behavior. _An identity, not an act. Doc knows, on some level, that thinking about it the way the younger generations do way is progress, probably. But it doesn’t stop her from feeling isolated by it, _afraid_ of it. Like she’s on the outside looking in on something she helped build, before there were even _words_ for what she was, how she was. “I dunno,” she mumbles, pursing her lips, hating the dull, resentful ache in her chest. She doesn’t want to fit some bitter old dyke threatened by the new blood by new language, but here she is. “I just don’t think it’s my scene.” 

“I’ll buy all your drinks. And we can leave if you hate it,” Lightning begs, hopping off the bed and trapping Doc where she’s standing, getting up in her space and fake boxing the air between then. “C’mon, get pumped! We’re both gonna kiss some ladies tonight, ok?” 

Doc’s heart leaps up into her throat, and her gaze fixes self-deprecating on the perpetual red of Lightning’s perfect, smirking lips. “Probably not,” she says. “But fine. If you insist on going, I guess I’ll have to tag along. Keep you in line.” 

Lightning yelps then cheers, then rolls onto the balls of her bare feet too press her lips to Doc’s cheek, sudden and sloppy. 

Her breath is warm and she smells like gardenia shampoo and the faintest notes of her spicy men’s deodorant under that. She pulls away than thumbs over the lipstick mark she presumably left, grinning so huge it stings for Doc to look at it. “Yeah, to keep me in line. But also to keep me safe, right?” 

Doc reaches up and touches where Lightning’s lips just were. Her fingers come away stained in red, like she just felt inside the exit wound of a gun-shot. “Right,” she says. 


	6. all through the night

Doc doesn’t want to go to sleep. Her eyes are dry and heavy and her solar plexus aches, but she can’t be bothered by any of that. Lightning McQueen is next to her, lightly snoring, blonde hair spread out over the navy pillow cases like spun-gold in the moonlight. 

Doc watches her chest ride and fall. She counts her moles, _tries _to count her freckles before she realizes her eyes aren’t good enough anymore, that there are too many to keep track of. She’s like the sky, full to the brim with stars. And she’s _here, _somehow. This girl, made of honey and sunshine and octane and fire, parted her thighs last night and _begged_ for Doc, and it’s the sort of thing you wake up from and realize you dreamt up in the cold light of morning, so. Doc doesn’t want to wake up. She forces herself to not sleep. 

She replays the evening over and over again on a thrilling, unbelievable loop. 

Lightning crawled into her lap last after half a bottle of wine, looped her arms around Doc’s neck and hid her face in the ditch of her neck, cheeks hot, breath labored against her pulse. Doc’s heart was pounding, and Lightning _must_ have been able to feel it under her lips, she _must _have known what it did to her, to be cloaked in the smell of her sweat, her perfume. _I know I’m not your type _she’d said, smoothing her fingers through Doc’s silver crew-cut, nails razing her scalp like a mistake, like a miracle. _But maybe just…try it once? Just to see. M’good. I can be a good girl. Just let me try._

Doc has no idea where Lightning got it in her head she had a type at all, let alone how she convinced herself if she _did, _it didn’t include girls like her. Bratty girls who know they’re gorgeous, who have the world wrapped around their red-tipped fingers. Lightning is everything Doc is spellbound by, everything she’s ever wanted. 

And here she is, like a mistake, like a miracle. Doc blinks back sleep, and draws her trembling fingers down the curve of Lightning’s spine. Maybe, if she sees dawn crack through the window and watches the sun rise and spill light over Lightning’s body, She’ll stay. 

So, Doc will blink her way all through the night if she has to. She’ll count freckles, and stars, instead of sheep. 


	7. too darn hot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is part three of a challenge I'm doing to write fillets for all 30 songs in Cole Porter's songbook! Also, thank you to those of you who have bene reading these, I'm so honored and pleased folks are interested in my boys as girls <3 
> 
> content warning for: pining, minor internalized homophobia

The air conditioning in your garage gave up years ago. As a result it’s perpetually sweltering inside, enough you drip sweat from your furrowed brow to your calloused hands when you tinker on your car, when you pull out old photos and rifle through them after you’ve had too much whiskey and start to think about the past. 

Like the past, the heat is unbearable, metal siding trapping it fierce and burning and that’s why you spend so much time in there: it ensures solitude. No one will bother you in hell. 

Or, no one except Lightning McQueen. 

She follows you around like a stray digging through trash for scraps, if scraps are half-forgotten racing wisdom and strays were so fucking beautiful you couldn’t look at them dead on without feeling sick. She wrinkles her nose at the heat, picks her thick blonde air up off her neck and ties it into a high floppy bun on her head, but _still, _she stays. Just plops down and sits on your faded, vinyl topped bar-stool and swivels back and forth, demanding stories from the 50s, telling stories of her own. Never anything real or concrete from _her_ life, but fantasies of her future: races she wants to win, magazines she wants to grace the cover of, women she wants to kiss, tracks she wants to burn rubber on. _Hey, you think when I get my first real Piston cup, I’ll be somewhere I could meet Nicole Kidman? I bet if I ever got in a room with her I could work it. I Bet she’d be down. Hey, did you ever know anyone who raced as Le Mans? Imagine being the first girl to kick ass there. _Dream after dream, while she needles broken dreams out of you.

It’s not a fair trade, but you’re too much of a masochist to ever send her way. Instead you sweat, tighten bolts, and try not to look at her when she pulls off her tee shirt, so she’s in nothing but those short denim cutoffs she always wears and a stained camisole over a bra. “Kid,” you say when you stand, wiping your brow with a dirty forearm, gaze stubbornly fixed to her face, which isn’t much better or easier to stomach than the rest of her. Lightning’s lips are always painted red and kissable and she’s got eyes the color of a tropical ocean. Richer than the blue of your own, refusing to be watered down, taken with a chaser. “Put your shirt back on,” you croak, sounding exactly like the sort of old bitter woman you never wanted to become. 

“Hell no. It’s too darn hot in here, how are you even surviving in jeans?” she asks, hooking her finger into the space between her tits and pulling the fabric down. “Yeaugh, it’s like a swamp between them.” 

You tear your eyes away, rub your face into your shoulder to hide the blush. “If it’s too hot, you can leave. No one’s keeping you here.” 

“I like being here,” she said easily, hopping off the stool and wandering around the garage absently, touching things she shouldn’t. You try to ignore her, even though your heart is speeding, your stomach clenching every time you inhale and smell the spice of her sweat. She opens up the mini-fridge on the work table beside you, arm brushing against your side as she surveys the selection, eventually grabbing two coronas and a water bottle. “Here,” she says, handing you one of the beers. “Tell me about Fireball Beach.” 

You sigh, and grumble, and a few moments of silence pass before you realize you’re opening your mouth to let decades worth of pent up words fall from your lips in a tumble. You don’t want to talk about the past, not really. It reminds you of things you won, things you lost. But still, even as you struggle against the urge to clam up and turn away, the stories _come. _It’s like a flood and it should be dried up in the terrible heat of this garage, but Lightning McQueen is here, and you don’t actually think you know _how_ to deny her things. You tried to get rid of her once a few months ago, and it didn’t work. All you can do it accept the terrible truth of her presence: she draws you out, she makes you weak, she spills you like wine across white sheets, forever stained and staining. You love her and there’s no where left to run from that. 

“It’s a good track,” you admit, rubbing your mouth with the back of your hand, caving like a sandcastle to the tide. “The sand—sand’s closer to dirt to race on that pavement, but it’s not exactly the same. You gotta pick line, or you’ll spin out.” 

She listens eagerly, nodding as she uncaps the water bottle, soaks her discarded shirt with it, and dabs the dripping fabric all over the back of her neck, her thighs, her flushed face. You chew the inside of your cheek, wishing it wasn’t so fucking hard not to look. “Ok, we gotta get to a beach someday to train, then. I want to be able to race on everything,” she says. You turn to her to say something just in time to see her dump the rest of the bottle over her head in a glittering cascade. The bun darkens from gold to copper under it, and she shakes like a dog, spraying you. 

“Hey,” you say, wiping the droplets off, even though you’d rather lick them up. You crave the taste of her shampoo, the feel of her lotion sticky against your skin if she were ever to push one of her legs between yours. You want her to melt under you; you want this heat to reduce you _both_ to liquid and your puddles to dissolve into each other. It’s the only way you will ever be able to have her, to touch her. “You got me wet,” you mindlessly add, lost in the flicker of her throat, where water has collected. 

She sticks her tongue into her cheek, laughs at you while rivulets dribble down her freckled shoulders and darken the white of her camisole, making it stick to the skin of her stomach. “Wow, Doc. Thank you. M’flattered.” 

You tear your eyes away, grinding your teeth. You love her and there’s no where left to run from that. 


	8. In the still of the night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another Cole porter song. NO real content warnings on this!

Doc thinks too much. 

It’s because her insomnia keeps her up past the time she’s logical, and then she’s defenseless against the driving force of the night, pushing her past sense, past compartmentalization, past the present and into the murky terror of the future. She brews herself herbal tea and tips a shot of Bailey’s into it when this happens, and sometimes that’s enough. It sends her back to bed where she can turn down the sheets and curl up next to Lightning, hook an arm around the maddeningly soft ditch of her waist and pull her close, inhale from her hair as she drifts to sleep. 

Other times, it doesn’t work. She still thinks too much, but this time she thinks too much _drunk, _and the doubt sifts in more fiercely, blackening the sand of her mind with tar. She asks herself one hundred questions, wondering how long this things gonna last before Lightning burns out, tires of her, misses long smooth legs and pouting lips and the thrill of being the experienced one, the one who gets to teach younger girls all the ways their bodies can bend. 

When Doc can’t sleep and she watches the harsh glow of the moon spread over the cactus garden in her backyard through the sliding glass door, and imagines all the ways in which Lightning will leave her. All the ways in which she’s inadequate, all the ways in which the two of them, no matter how neatly and perfectly they fit together when the doors are locked, are _impossible. _

She pours herself more Bailey’s and asks the moon, _Do you love me, like I love you? _as if Lightning McQueen were the moon. As if she doesn’t know the answer, which is, of course, _I think I do, but I couldn’t possibly. The world I come from is too different, even if on some days, I feel like a mirror image, the girl you were when you were twenty and just getting your tires dirty, hunting victory. I love you, but my love is not your love. It’s not decades of longing, seas and seas of shame. It’s new and its raw and its hungry and you are a finite source of everything it craves. _

Doc is startled from silence by the sound of bare feet failing to skip the squeaky floor boards in the hall. She looks up from her drink and there in the moonlight is the moon: Lightning with her hair in a messy pony tail, her eyes crumpled at the corners and half shut with sleep. She’s wearing a pair of threadbare underwear and Doc’s robe and nothing else, and Doc’s heart clenches with how badly she wants to hold onto her, like sand under her feet as the tide rushes in. “What’re you doing?” Lightning asks, voice nothing but a croak. “I woke up n’you were gone and I couldn’t fall back asleep.” 

Doc shakes her head. “I couldn’t sleep either. Come out here to think.” 

“Your back hurting?” she asks, eyes widening as she pads closer, lays a hand on the worst spot, between Doc’s straight up and down shoulder blades. 

“Yeah,” she admits, conscious of the pain now that Lightning’s gentle palm is pressed to it, bringing awareness to places that feel dead without her touch. “But—also. Just awake. S’ok, baby. You can go back to bed.” 

She ignores the suggestion, drops into Doc’s lap instead and hangs her arms around her neck, nuzzling her sleep warm face into the crease of it, where she doesn’t seem to care there are wrinkles. “Sucks to be in our bed without you,” she says then, pressing a lazy kiss to Doc’s pulse, breath huffing out, sweet and sleepy. Doc’s stomach drops at the way she says _ours. _“Come back?” 

Doc rubs her spine, feels her ribcage expand into the shape of her cupped palm, kisses her hair with three, four, five soft kisses. “Alright,” she mumbles. “I might not be able to sleep, though. I’ll stay until you can, though.” 

“Nope,” Lightning mumbles, pulling back to kiss Doc, mouth sweet and half open, tasting like sleep, like dreams.“I’ll stay up with you if you can’t.,” she offers instead. And when she stands she’s backlit in moonlight, the most beautiful thing, and Doc decides to stop thinking, as she reaches out to hold her hand. 

“Alright, princess. Take me back to bed.” 


	9. I get a kick out of you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another Cole porter song! and this is for the person who requested more pining Lightjing ;) 
> 
> Content warning for casual sex, drinking, and drunk sex.

Lightning’s fucked a lot of gorgeous girls. 

Aspiring models and actresses who show up at races to promote brands. The sweet, apple-pie, girl next door type from fly-over states who make up the majority of her female fanbase. Bitchy photographers and personal trainers who remind her of the cheerleaders she lusted after and competed with for homecoming queen in high school, the sort who pretend they hate her until she has their legs over their shoulders, her fingers knuckle-deep and crooked into magic. She’s even fucked other aspiring racers on practice tracks, promised things she couldn’t follow through on, then cried about it later once she was alone, terrified of being blackmailed, her secrets spilled. 

She’s fucked so many girls that sometimes she forgets to be present for it, dousing her loneliness in wine until she can’t stand straight, tottering down hallways with two pairs of heels in her hand so no one snaps their ankle. Then she wakes with foundation stains on her hotel pillows the next morning when she rouses alone with a headache, acrylic nail scratches up and down her back from a girl who’s name she can’t remember, who’s long gone, faded into Vegas or Hollywood or _wherever _like smoke, like nothing at all. 

Lightning’s fucked so many girls she’s gotten bored with fucking girls, has gone out on a few dates with men before the kiss at the end of the night rolls up and she realizes yet again, with new and terrifying clarity, how much she _doesn’t_want this. She always sends them away with an awkward peck on the cheek, her lipstick staining them, marking their confusion like a bull’s eye. Boredom is not an absence of desire, and she’s had to learn this, over and over again. 

She thought she was numb, when she woke up in the police station in Radiator Springs. 

She’d been numb for several years, anyway, heart cold and hidden behind so many seemingly impenetrable walls even _she_ forgot how to pick locks, the combinations to break free. She was hardened, and aggressively defended, and as a result, very, very lonely. 

It’s fucking weird that Doc Hudson with her silver crew-cut and ice blue eyes are what makes Lightning _feel _something for the first time in god knows how long. 

First off, Lightning’s never in her _life_ had a conscious or enduring crush on a butch woman. Its not that she isn’t attracted to them—she definitely is, she always has been—it’s more that they seem separate form her and her experience somehow, unattainably hot, _beyond her. _She’s always been too afraid to talk to them, instead opting to seduce girls who are questioning there identity, who have only made out with other women in front of men, who are seeking more like junkies chasing a high. That way, she can wield the power; she can pretend she knows what she’s doing. With butch women, she’d have to surrender, and she’s terrified of that. 

So maybe it’s _not_ weird, that Doc is the woman that undoes her for good. Maybe it makes perfect fucking sense, maybe her life of longing and avoidance and fear and hunger has led her here, cuffed in the courtroom of the exact type of women who she’s always feared she wasn’t good enough for, not _gay_enough for, but wanted all the same in her heart of hearts.

Doc looks her up and down the first time they meet, and it makes her stomach drop so fucking hard she has to clench her teeth to counter balance, to keep them from chattering. _I’ll get that under control_ she thinks to herself, but it doesn’t _stop. _Not when she pretends to hate Doc, not when she loses to her on the track, not when she caves to the sway of a fierce wind and admits she can learn something from her. Not when she becomes her crew chief. Not when she becomes her friend. 

It feels fucking terrible, wanting someone she’s so close to, keeping a secret again like she did in the 6th grade, when she harbored a sickening crush on her school carpool, a skater girl who wore snapbacks and listened to Nirvana, who rolled joints in front of Lightning back before her name was Lightning and said, _don’t take this up, kid. Promise me, ok? _Before she wet the rolling paper with her chapped, licked lips.

Every time Doc calls her kid, Lightning’s pulse races and she’s transported back to the hopeless concrete sprawl of some parking lot in nowhere Mississippi, watching her carpool hold her joint with long fingers and chewed down nails. Except it’s different this time: Lightning isn’t some babydyke who doesn’t know who she is or what she wants, she’s thirty, she’s wasted years with booze and fear, but now she knows exactly what she wants and she’s _right_ in front of her, steely and warm all at once, smelling like matacide and engine grease and the sweet spice of cologne. The cleanest and dirtiest smells all at once and _fucking god, _Lightning wants her. Wants to be her girl, wants to sink to her knees and surrender, like she’s always been afraid to do. 

She _can’t_ though, not when there’s the chance Doc will straight up laugh in her face. _You’re too young for me, kid, _she’d say, making an incredulous face and shaking her head like Lightning’s heart wouldn’t break to hear such a thing. _Plus, can’t you land any model you want? _

_They’re not you_ Lightning would say then, before she crumpled, before she begged, before she pressed kisses to Doc’s hipbones through the thin cotton of her button up, knees skinned on the same dirt she’s only just learned to race on. _No one is you. _

She doesn’t say anything, though. She douses her loneliness in wine until she can’t stand straight, tottering down hallways with two pairs of heels in her hand so no one snaps their ankle.


	10. Do I Love You?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A veryyyy sappy cole porter song. Content warning for mild descriptions of insecurity, internalized homophobia, and dysphoria.

Doc’s hands sift through the sweat-messy wreck of Lightning’s hair, wrist deep and snagging through tangles. She had part of it shaved at the salon the other day, an _undercut_, it’s apparently called, and Doc’s heart leaps every time her fingers stumble over the soft, recently shorn bristles. She loves getting to touch new parts of Lightning, loves finding bits of her unobstructed, loves learning her bones. 

Lightning is currently pressing a series of hungry, open-mouthed kisses to the place where Doc’s pale blue button up is tucked into her jeans. She leaves a litany of imperfect red marks in her wake, and they might stain, but Doc has given up the constant battle of being covered in Lightning’s lipstick. She pretends to grumble about it, but in private she smiles at the imprints, she thumbs over them with her breath in her throat at the way they smear, so much _evidence _that she’s been kissed. She wants to be painted in them, a map of hidden, buried treasure in the shape of Lighting McQueen’s lips. 

“Can I?” Lighting breathes, lashes fluttering against her cheeks as she moves a tentative palm up the inside of Doc’s thigh, the heat of her touch bleeding through worn in denim. 

She shifts to cup her mound tentatively, and when Doc says, “Sure, baby, all yours,” she lets out a long, relieved breath, corners of her scarlet mouth turning up into a shit-eating grin. 

“Fuck yeah,” she mumbles, making quick work of the the button and zipper with chipped red nails, racing like she’s behind the wheel, like she’s worried Doc might change her mind if she doesn’t hurtle towards the finish line with that lush mouth, the eager, sloppy pout of it so powerful she thinks it can absolve doubt, or habit, or fear. 

Doc doesn’t blame her for speeding ahead, not really. After all, she didn’t let Lightning touch her in earnest until they’d been solidly fucking for nearly five months, so Lightning still acts like there’s a chance she’ll be denied access, still acts like she’s winning the goddamned lottery every time Doc lets her push her fingers inside, lets her _taste. _

Lightning still seems to think, no matter how many times Doc tells her otherwise, that she doesn’t _want_ her mouth, doesn’t want her this way at all. Of course, Doc does. She always has, so much so sometimes it would make her sick with longing, but the way she conceives of her sex and of her _body_ has always been different than Lighting, and forging that vast river between them wasn’t just something she could _do_ in a day. She had to trust Lightning wasn’t just trying this thing on out of curiosity, that it wasn’t an experiment, that she wasn’t disposable to her like every other girl Doc had witnessed her pursue. 

Plus, besides the surging rapids of difference yawning between them, there were the sharp, slippery rocks rocks hidden beneath the current: shame, uncertainty, self-loathing. Doc had long since reconciled her desperate love for women, but making _them_ feel good under her hands, her mouth, had always felt more surmountable than letting _them_ make her feel good. In one position, she can keep her clothes on, she can maintain her composure, she can force someone to let go without ever really letting go of herself. But on her back, with her legs spread…there are so many more wounds exposed, so many more vacancies to fill. 

She is is a tough oyster to shuck, salt-crusted shut with the hardest of shells, but Lightning is persistent, and patient. There were five months of sweetness and begging and promises she somehow managed to keep and then, her lips are so, so red. Eventually Doc dissolved in her sway, and here she is now: pulling her hair, pulsing between her own legs in desperate anticipation at the oncoming tide of heat and slick. 

Once she’s convinced Doc isn’t changing her mind, Lightning makes a big show of sitting back on her heels and wiping the remnants of her lipstick all over her shoulder in a greasy smudge. “Do you love me?” she asks before sucking on one of her fingers, as if Doc isn’t wet, as if this isn’t just teasing. 

Doc laughs, shakes her head and trembles at the way sweat is collecting between Lightning’s tits and glistening like fool’s gold under the overhead light, at the way her eyes are pupil-dark and hungry from what lies ahead of them.“What do you think, kid?” She says gently. 

“I know,” Lightning murmurs, dipping forward again with her newly rubbed-naked mouth and her hair sweeping over Doc’s heaving chest in a glorious blonde curtain. “Just like to hear you say it.” 

Doc reaches up, fits her palm to the exposes part of Lightning’s scalp. “M’only gonna say this once, so listen close, alright?” 

“Alright,” she whispers. 

“I worship you,” Doc admits, and she says it like its a joke but it’s _not, _it’s the truest thing she’s ever let touch the air, or at least the air that’s not flush against Lightning’s skin, her pulse, the shell of her ear where no one else can hear. 

Lightning grins smugly, sweetly. Then she puts her hair up in a hasty ponytail, and prepares to drown at the junction of the river. 


	11. always true to you in my fashion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cole porter song. also nothing wrong with coming out at bi, Lightning just happens to be a lesbian, so. tw for closeting, PR, bearding, and jealousy.

When Lightning gets the green light to come out, there are two conditions: it has to be as bi and not as a lesbian, and she has to be publicly dating a man when the announcement drops. 

It’s not perfect, it’s. not the _truth. _But Lighting is a business woman and she’ll take whatever scraps of authenticity she can claw away from the fierce jaws of the stupid, sexist professional sports industry. She’ll count her losses, and let herself believe that between them, there are wins. 

Doc, however, hates it from the get-go. “You’re not bi-sexual,” she says spitting the word bitterly, as if it hurts her mouth, as if it has too many syllables. The way she says it makes Lightning cringe, like so many of the things Doc says which are accidentally insensitive, or politically incorrect. Lightning forgets she’s in her seventies sometimes, until she’s rudely forced to remember. “And I hate the idea of you having some—_boy_friend.” 

“Babe,” Lightning pleads, fixing her hands on Doc’s blazer lapels and shaking her gently by them. “I know. I _know_ all that, obviously. But this has _gotta_ be better than pretending to be _straight, _right? Plus. It won’t be a _real_ boyfriend, he’s gay. Some NFL guy who needs to be even more discreet about shit than I do.” 

She sags, pressing her forehead to Lighting’s in defeat. “But you’ll have to kiss him, won’t you?” 

“I dunno. Some stage-smooch like people do in 7th grade plays, ok?It’s _nothing._” Lightning assures her, but Doc frowns, clearly committed to being insecure, inconsolable. Lighting sighs, kissing her chin. She _hates_ to see her like this. “Doc, Please. M’still your girl,” she reminds her, gaze soft, lips softer. 

“Are you?’ Doc asks, rubbing a steady hand up her spine. She’s quiet, for a moment, smiling ever so slightly like she’s trying to convince herself of something. Lightning counts three even breaths before Doc inhales sharply and says, “I think—I worry, sometimes. That if people _know, _even just a fraction of the truth…they’ll come for you. They’ll come and take you away from me.” 

Lightning gasps, horrified at the mere idea. “No, C’mon. Wild horses _could not.” _

_“Hm. _Maybe…but what about hoards of pretty young girls who finally know they can have you? What about—”

“Correction, they can’t have me. Because I’m yours,” Lightning assures her, squeezing her tight and close, locking her arms around the strong, straight line of her shoulders. “Just think of this all as one step closer to when I can tell the whole stupid NASCAR_ world_ I belong to my hot-ass crew chief. Then I won’t have to wear your ring on a necklace.” She fishes the bathtub chain out from between her tits, the ring glinting in the kitchen light, warm from her skin. “I can wear it on my finger.” 

Doc takes her hand, folded everything towards the palm and gently kisses her knuckles, face softening like she’s imagining that gold band glinting against the pale pink of Lightning’s skin. “Ok,” she mumbles, eyes fluttering closed. “ok.” 


	12. Let's do it

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's fall in love! another Cole porter song and I don't think there's any tw here? unless casual sex upsets you.

They’ve been fucking casually for about four months now, and naturally, it’s turned into a problem. 

Doc’s not even sure how it started, how the hell she managed to rationalize such a terrible idea in the first place. She was probably drunk and exhausted and missing the way a girl felt spasming around her knuckles so badly she couldn’t remember why she should never tempt fate where Lightning McQueen is concerned. Or else Lightning was on one of her wildly stubborn kicks where she begged for something so goddamned relentlessly she ended up wearing Doc down, convincing them both with sheer persistence. However it happened, it happened, and Doc tricked herself into thinking maybe it would work out, end in something other than heartbreak and burnt bridges. The thing is, she’s not half-bad at compartmentalizing her feelings so effectively she stops feeling them at all. She decided Lightning was just a fuck, that showing her how good it felt to be held down and eaten out until she lost track of how many times she came wasn’t all that different from showing her how to hold fast around the curves of a dirt track to keep from spinning out.

Of course, that was bullshit. It was bullshit then and it was certainly bullshit now, when Lightning’s all but _stopped_ bringing girls back to her hotel room, when they sleep in the same bed most nights _after_ they’re through and half the time, Doc wakes up and Lightning’s still tangled in her sheets, sometimes wearing one of her old-lady sweaters with the cable knit since she got cold in the middle of the night decided to rifle through the clothes hamper instead of jut leaving how she used to. 

And _fuck, _Doc should have never gotten used to it enough to want it become a permanent thing, but here she is. Rolling over as the dawn-light creeps in past the blinds and pressing her face into Lightning’s mess of blonde hair and inhaling the smell of her own two-in-one men’s shampoo from it. Curling an arm around her soft narrow waist and praying to a god she’s never believed in that Lightning never gets tired of this, that she realizes, like Doc has realized, this _isn’t _as casual as they’d intended for it to stay. 

Doc should say something about it, but instead she lets it continue on unspoken for another few weeks. He wrist aches perpetually from the angle she needs to hold it at to touch Lightning just right, and her jaw is twice as sore from licking her open for hours, and her sheets are stained with lipstick and come and normally these things would annoy her, needle into her side and make her wonder if having a pretty girl in her bed all the time was _worth_ all the trouble, but she doesn’t wonder, not this time. She drinks her coffee in the morning while Lightning sleeps in and pretends that when she comes padding in, she’ll kiss Doc on the mouth, instead of looking at her sly and long like she’s got a secret and mumble, _thanks for the racing practice last night, grandma. _

_I think I’m in love with you_ is the lie she should tell in response to all of Lightning’s evasions. How she should counter the ease with which Lightning talks about sex like she’s young enough to know exactly how to keep sex easy. 

The next time Lightning comes over after practice with a bottle of wine, the way her long, slender fingers curl around the glass neck makes Doc have to sit back down on the couch, put her face in her hands in defeat. And and as simple as that, she realizes she can’t do this anymore. She’s not cut out for it. 

“What?” Lightning asks, dropping onto the cushion beside her, flipping her hair from one shoulder to another. “Never seen you look so grumpy about red wine, It’s not even April yet, m’not gonna switch to pink until its summer, deal with it.” 

“It’s not that—fuck. Lightning,” Doc mumbles, reaching for the bottle before Lighting can pop the cork and pour them glasses and make this any fucking harder than it already is. “I don’t think we should be doing this anymore.” 

Lightning looks surprised, eyes flashing wide and blue, the black core of them dilating abruptly. “What? Why?” 

“Because—‘cause you’re young, kid. And m’not, And it was fun while it lasted but it’s not fun for me, anymore, m’too old to have fun for fun’s sake. So, you ought to go find girls you can have fun with. Girls like you.” 

She was not, in any way, expecting Lightning to look upset. She expected protest, maybe, rolled eyes and dismissal and Lightning’s usual blasé, irreverent attitude. But instead her face falls, something dark washing over it as she kicks off her shoes and draws her feet up onto the couch, knees towards her chest and into a defensive ball. “What—what’s not fun about it? When did it stop being fun for you?” she asks hollowly, swallowing. 

“Oh, babygirl,” Doc mumbles, wanting to reach out and pet her arm, her golden hair. She doesn’t though, because Lightning jerks away from her the second she moves her hand. 

“Don’t call me that if you won’t want me anymore,” she snaps. 

Doc stares at her, baffled. _Of course I want you_ she thinks, _want you so bad, want you forever, and that can’t fucking work with a girl like you and an old woman like me, so that’s why I’ve got to let you go. You’re gonna drive off into your own sunset, kid, not cut your story short to lie down and die in mine. _She can’t _say_ any of that, though, it’s too raw, too honest, so she just shakes her head, purses her lips. “I just think we want different things.” 

Lightning scoffs, eyes welling up. She grabs the bottle of wine and says, “Yeah, clearly.” Then, as she struggles with the corkscrew, she adds harshly, “M’ so fucking stupid.” 

“Look, kid, I don’t know why you’re so upset,” Doc pleads, gaze searching Lightning’s face for answers. She can’t tell the truth, she cant say _I fell for you and now it hurts too bad, _so she scrambles for a half-truth amid the painful shards of whatever she’s just broken. “This isn’t about you, it’s about me. It’s—it’s just that we didn’t start this thing to fall in love. But you—you’re the sort of girl I could fall in love with and m’ too old to feel that way about a fast, gorgeous, impossible thing like you that’ll never—”

Lightning looks up fiercely, eyes spilling over from the corners as the blinks and says, “Or, how about we just—do it.” 

“Do what?” Doc asks, heart clenching, stomach dropping. 

Lightning sniffles, pours herself a glass of wine, and throws it back like it’s a liquor shot. “Fall in love,” she says then, lips stained dark. “You’re acting like—like you’re the only one half-there and. Well. S’not very fair. Like. You know I never like to do anything alone, and that m’faster than you anyway.” 

Doc chews the inside of her cheek, stunned. It’s too good to be true, she wouldn’t believe it on paper but she can see the hurt in Lightning’s eyes, and that’s not something she can fake . “Gimme a glass of that,” she says eventually, thoughts swirling, gut still in knots. 

Lightning does, and when she hands it off their fingers brush. “Cheers,” Doc says, clinking their glasses together so violently some wine sloshes out. Lightning gasps, pulls back to lick the red-purple droplet off the pale stretch of skin between thumb and forefinger. “To one more terrible idea you’ve talked me into,” Doc murmurs, watching the pink, terrible flash of her tongue. 

Very tentatively, Lightning smiles. “You know, you never take as much convincing as you like to pretend.” 

_And that’s because love you_ Doc thinks, wine bitter as she swallows it down, eyes traveling over Lightning’s face, following the trail her mascara dark tear left across the cut of her flushed cheek. “Hell. Guess I don’t like you doing things alone, either.” 


	13. ev'ry time we say goodbye

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for secret relationship, PR, mentioned homophobia, etc.

You hate being away from Doc, even if you’re not technically _away_ from her. 

Before you were her girl behind closed doors, you _lived for_ press days. Nothing made you feel more loved than the heat of lights, or being fawned over by fans, primped by make up artists for interviews where you could flirt with the magazine rep girls holding the mic, make them question their whole entire existence when you winked at them. You lit up in front of the cameras, spent entire nights schmoozing sponsors at parties, not even caring when your ankles ached in your heels or if you were exhausted or jet-lagged. 

Back then the whirlwind of the racing world eased the sting of your perpetual, shameful loneliness. If you were working all day, the less time you had to spend alone with yourself and your own thoughts, in huge hotel suites with no one to share your celebratory post-win champagne, no friends back home to call and catch up with. So, you surrounded yourself in lights, in people, even if they only saw you as an asset, and not as a real person. 

Now it all just feels so fucking hollow, because _everything_ you want is behind closed doors, in stolen moments. 

You want Doc’s strong arms curled tight around your back, you want her palm sliding up the inseam of your thigh teasingly. You want her kisses, pressed warm and heavy to your cheeks, your throat, your hair, your stomach, which you’ve only just learned to not suck in all the time. You want her breath against the shell of your ear, you want her steadying touch at the small of your back. You want her holding doors for you, pulling your chair out for you, you want her with your lipstick marks on her crisp, starched collars. You want her so fucking bad, all the time, it drives you crazy. 

She’s there, while you do press now. Sometimes you’ll do interviews together, or photoshoots, since there’s been so much interest in her comeback to racing. Everyone wants to know why you finally caved and kept a crew chief around, why she agreed to take on a challenging project like you, if she’s incorporating her experience with dirt-track racing into the manner in which she trains you. So, you’ll answer questions together, take pictures standing back to back with your arms crossed over your chests for stupid headlines like _Girl Power: NASCAR’S Rebel Duo _or _Seeing Double: How Racing’s First Bad Girl is Training its Latest . _Everyone sees you as a unit, but _not_ in the way you actually are. You have to grind your teeth through questions calling her your mother figure, your older, wiser sister. You have you sit beside her for hours feeling hobbled, because you cannot touch her, you cannot even trust yourself to look her straight in the eye, because the way you look at her feels too loaded, too revealing. Sometimes you spend the entire day together, but not _together. _

And after enough time faking it you feel, in some weird way, like she’s leaving you. Like she’s already left. 

After a particularly long day doing a shoot for a cover spread in Sports Illustrated, you feel yourself nearing some crucial breaking point. She’s brought you coffee and smiled at you a few times when you let yourself look at her, but mostly she’s been dipping in and out to take phone calls, to chat with the PAs. Every time she steps out you feel like your heart is breaking, like the color has drained from the room, and finally you can’t fucking take it anymore. The next break, you grab her elbow, and steer her towards dressing room. 

“Where are we going?” she asks, amused, pulling gently out of your grip because the two of you have agreed to touch as minimally as possible when you’re in public. You know you helped _invent _that rule, but it breaks your heart just the same. 

“M’ just—I miss you,” you mumble, wiping your eyes before you remember how much make up you’re wearing for the shoot. You shift your gaze up to the ceiling instead, trying to will the tears back in. “I fucking hate this. I get to see you but I don’t get—we don’t get—”

“Shh, shh, shh,” Doc says, pushing you into the dressing room and latching the door before pulling you close, pressing her face into your blown-out hair. “I know, babygirl. It’s hard, getting to see you all done up but not getting to tell you how pretty you look.” 

You sniffle, melting into her. You’re relieved she isn’t telling you to suck it up, that she’s affected by these days of restraint, too. “I know its stupid, but sometimes I think it like. That you don’t mind. That you don’t need me as bad as I need you or something.” 

Doc laughs, tilts you back to gently thumb the mascara marks up under your eyes. “S’not stupid. You know, on days like these, when you fake it all for the camera so good…sometimes I think I dreamt this part of us up. That it never really happened and all the stuff you say about our professional relationship for the articles is true. Or, I think you miss this side of things, that you’re gonna flirt your way into some interviewer’s skirt again and forget I ever existed.” 

Heart clenching, you hold her tight, dig your fingers into the muscle framing her straight up and down spine. “Never,” you mumble, kissing her jaw. “All I do is fake smile and think about when I get to have you like this again. It’s all I do.” 

“Then let’s head back out there so we can wrap up this shoot and get the fuck back to our hotel room, kid,” she tells you, cupping your face gently between her hands. “Sound good?” 

“Yeah,” you sigh, putting the happy face on, shaking your hair out, standing a little taller. “Only a few more hours.” 


	14. all of you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for drinking and mentions of aging anxiety.

Doc’s spread out on her side of the bed wearing sweats and one of Lightning’s over-sized racing jerseys, cheeks flushed from wine and sex as Lightning refills both of their glasses, pouring heavy because it’s one of those nights. She makes her way back, short silk robe open over nothing as she tries not to trip on pile after pile of discarded clothing. “Here,” she says, passing Doc the glass before climbing into her lap, straddling the breadth of her hips. “For round two.” 

“Can we call it round two if you’ve already come eight times?” Doc growls, setting the wine down and reaching for the generous heft of Lightning’s tits, thumbing over her nipples which are sore and sensitive from being sucked. 

“Ten” Lightning corrects, shrugging off the robe so it slides down her back, leaves her shoulders naked so Doc can see all the marks she left there. “Or maybe thirteen. Sort of hard to count, when you’re ascending to some higher plane of existence or whatever.” 

Doc’s not listening, though. She’s _touching,_ looking lost and found all at once as her palms smooth down Lightning’s ribcage, sweet and slow and longing. Lightning settles into the heat of her hands, tilting her head back so her hair sweeps over the lowermost curve of her back. “My pretty girl,” Doc mumbles, one hand moving lower, so she can thumb over the golden curls between her legs, spreading them to see pink. “Love how long these are getting.” 

Lightning blushes, suddenly dizzy. She lays her hands on Doc’s shoulders to study herself, cunt pulsing as Doc touches her without really _touching _her. Just teases and examines and _stares, _like staring is drinking and Lightning is an oasis in the middle of nowhere desert. “Sometimes I think you only love me for my blonde pubes,” she jokes, bending to press her lips to the paper-thin, crinkles skin at Doc’s temple. 

“Stop. I love you for a lot of things,” she murmurs, punishingly tugging at the hair in question. 

“Yeah, but you have like, a _fetish_ for my pubes,” Lighting reminds her, thinking back to when they first started this thing, and Doc coaxed her out of the habit of shaving every other day, how she likes to press her face there and inhale, how she likes to pet the hair away from the slit and just look her fill, until Lightning is squirming with want. “It’s like, one of the first things to you said to me, the first time we kissed. You’re obsessed.” 

“I did _not,” _Doc scolds, curling her arms around Lightning’s waist and capsizing them both, dumping her onto the bed beside her as she yelps. Lightning flops down, vision all static and stars as she spreads out, stomach dropping at the way Doc _looks_ at her. Like she wants to eat her up, like she can’t believe she’s so lucky. Lightning reaches down, and teasingly threads her own fingers through her pubes, putting herself on display. 

“You did,” she arguess, thighs parting so Doc can fit herself between them. “We were both shitfaced and I thought I was dreaming because like, that was the sort of thing I was regularly dreaming about, right? So was all _god she’s kissing me finally this is the most romantic moment of my life_ and then, you fucking snapped the waistband of my jeans against me and were like, _do the curtains match the drapes? _and I was so gone for you I actually thought it was _hot.” _

Doc laughs, so much so it rumbles through them both as she rubs her face between Lightning’s tits, presses her into the mattress, pushes her hands between her back and the bed to hold her tight. “You’re so full of shit, kid. I think I said _are you blonde down here too? “_ she clarifies, before making a face, shaking her head. “Hell. I guess that’s pretty bad, too.” 

“It’s terrible. You’re terrible. I can’t believe it made me like…drip,” Lightning says then, shoving Doc off and rolling onto her side, bending one knee to expose herself. Doc’s gaze trails predictably down, and Lightning gets to watch her eyes get dark, her lips pulled between her teeth before she licks them. “You really think my bush is pretty?” she asks then, coyly. 

Doc cups her palm around her mount lovingly, squeezing before she thumbs gently, teasingly over her clit. “I think all of you is pretty, baby. Love you here…love your tits. Your smile. The grey hairs you’re so bent out of shape about.” 

“Whay grey hairs?” Lightning said sharply, pressing her cunt into the heel of Doc’s hand, hissing. “I dyed them in an existential panic, remember?” 

“Well I love them. Under the dye. And I love your…I dunno. The weird stuff. Your elbow skin and the way you smell when you cry. _god,” _she moans then, like she’s moved, dipping close to lick up the nearly translucent trail of downy hair under Lightning’s navel. “All of you.” 

Lightning wants to say _I love all of you too, always and forever, even if you you get too old to remember me, even if I crash the 95 end up a flaming pile of rubble. Even then, I’ll burn, and I’ll smoke, and I’ll love you still. _But she can’t make herself talk when her throat is tight like this, clenched shut like a collapsed tunnel, when Doc is parting her folds and rubbing the sweet slick of her in circles around her clit. So, she cups her hand on the back of Doc’s skull, and hopes the touch says everything she can’t


	15. begin the beguine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for unrequited love, mentions of Lightning/others, and drinking

Doc can forget, sometimes, that Lightning kissed her once. 

After all, she’s worked hard to forget it. Drank to make the heat of it muddy, quarantined it behind so many walls on most days, it feels like just another one of her dreams, her desires, instead of something that actually happened to her. 

But then, she’ll fucking hear a Rihanna song. On the radio or over the grainy speakers at the grocery store, on those mixes Guido makes to blast in the pits because Lightning once told him it helps pump her up. That honey and bourbon voice hits her like a sucker punch and before she can tune it out, all her hard work evaporates on the spot and there she is, remembering the soft give of Lightning McQueen’s lips, the way her own mouth tasted like Rum and pineapple juice when she pulled away, under the initial sting of lime, of salt. 

Before she even _realizes _it’s Rihanna, she’ s transported violently back to Daytona against her will. The sway of the palm trees, the way the pavement around the hotel pool was gritty with sand since everyone tracked it in from the beach. The way Lightning had spun and nearly toppled when Rihanna came on, shoulders peeling from sunburn, nails painted red as they curled around the plastic cup housing her half-spilled her drink. “Rihanna makes me sloppy,” she’d announced as Doc righted her balance instinctually, curling an arm around her lower back to keep her from falling into the pool. 

She’d made her dance, then, how she always does if Doc risks getting too close to her when she’s the loose, goofy sort of drunk she always gets after she wins. She twisted her hands into the back pf Doc’s button up and made her sway, lipstick smudged, cheeks flushed as she sang along, all coy and flirtatious because she doesn’t give fuck if she breaks Doc’s heart or not. “Te amo, then she put her hands around my waist,” she purred, twirling, blonde hair hitting Doc in the face, getting in her mouth and smelling like sunscreen and sea. 

“Do you know what that means?” Doc had asked, closing her hands around Lightning’s narrow wrists to steady her. The pool glittered blue just beyond the shape of her, lit up, and the music thrummed and Doc did too, feeling drunk on Lightning’s too-close breath, the way it was still so warm outside, even though the sun set over an hour ago, dropped low and heavy and orange just beyond the horizon. 

“I love you,” Lightning had said easily, batting her lashes over hazy eyes. “In Spanish.” And then, everything changed: she leaned forward onto the balls of her bare, dirty feet, closed her pretty eyed, and kissed Doc right on the mouth.

She was warm and soft and her pulse picked up under the pressure of Doc’s fingers, and right when Doc recovered from the shock and very nearly caught her breath enough to kiss her back her back, she twisted away, giggling. Then she snapped the strap of he red bikini against her shoulder, finished off the dredges of her drink, and jumped into the pool. 

The rest of the night was a blur. Doc can’t remember if she got drunk to cope or if she doesn’t remember it because nothing memorable happened, if she just sat there by the pool watching Lightning swim and wondering what the hell happened, or if she blocked something worse out. Lightning finding some pretty receptionist to flirt with, to bring back to her room. It’s hazy, palm trees and the smell of diesel and ocean and tropical mixers.

All Doc knows for certain is that she thought something might happen again after that night, but it never did, and she’s a fucking fool for letting the folly of _hope_ hurt her. 

She forgets, most days. It’s easier to forget, because then the hope doesn’t come back. But sometimes she hears Rihanna and before she can process it she thinks of Lightning’s laugh, the taste of rum, the blown-out black of her pupils when she pulled away with smiling, shining lips. And no matter how much Doc doesn’t want to hope, how much she _can’t, _she always does. That Lightning will kiss her again, that she said _I love you_ in Spanish because she meant it, in English. In every language, just as Doc means it in every language. 

Sometimes she stands there in the aisle at the dollar tree holding a package of Fig Newtons and staring at the scuffed linoleum, lost in thought and the sunsets at Daytona until the song ends and she picks herself up a bottle of whiskey before she leaves. Other times, she runs. Leaves before the memory can stick, before she can be haunted by Bacardi and salt and the feel of Lightning’s blood speeding under her touch. 


	16. get out of town

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for mentions of internalized homophobia. this is just cars 1.

The second she sees Lightning McQueen, Doc wants her gone. Rooster tails of dust, marks in the shape of her tires, scorched rubber and a ruined road in her wake but at least, _at least_ not a broken heart, too.

She’s been following her career with more than an idle interest for the last several months, so she feels like she already knows her. The pretty parts, the ugly ones. Lightning McQueen the rookie sensation, her breakneck rise to fame, the way she’s blown through crew chiefs one after another, filing sexual harassment claims and badmouthing the big wigs and racing legends every time she opens her smirking mouth for an interview, lips painted red, shaped like something off one of those cardboard valentines folks buy at the grocery store some February to pretend they’re not lonely. She’s a spitfire, a rebel, and NASCAR with its good old boys club l_oves_ her, somehow. Or at least they love to hate her. She’s on every magazine cover, not just _Sports Illustrated _and _Motorsport _but _Elle, Seventeen_, until she ruined her press contract there by posing semi-nude for_ Playboy. _

Doc bought the issue. Lightning’s lying in a bed of red roses with a checkerboard flag over her tits, a fake trophy over her crotch, and presumably there’s more inside the magazine but Doc hasn’t looked at it, for fear of the longing and envy and sadness it will inevitably spark in her, to see a girl whose willing to play the game she never had a crack at winning. To see a girl in the tight, cruel jaws of the racing world grow fangs herself just to survive.

It’s a mean industry, and the only way for a woman to keep afloat is to become just as mean. Mean to herself, mean to her competitors, mean to her would-be friends because she probably thinks she can’t have those, as long as she’s behind the wheel and burning rubber. 

Doc wonders about Lightning McQueen. If she’s lying to herself and believes she wants the glory at any cost, or if she knows she’s playing by their rules, lonely and hungry and desperate, clawing at a door they want to slam in her face, treading water until she inevitably drowns in the impossible, relentless tide. 

But when Doc she sees Lightning cuffed in her courtroom, she doesn’t wonder anymore. She can spot it in the blue of her eyes, shining back at her wild and feral and scared: Lightning McQueen is lost. She has no fucking_ idea_ what she’s doing out there, or who she is, or how to live up to the shape of a woman she built, one big enough and cunning and sexy enough to change the face is NASCAR. She’s lost, and if Doc stares too long, she’ll want to find her. She’ll want to pull her close and beg, _let me show you everything I never got to show them, because they cut me off. Too scared or what I could do. Too scared of my short hair, my short nails, my men’s suits, the way the boys lost to me and the girls batted their lashes at me. Let me show you. Because you—you might actually be able to take this to the end. _

Instead, she demands Lightning leave. And when that doesn’t work, she starts cooking up a way for them to come take their golden girl away, devour her whole. 

Because Doc will only fall in to that tarpit too deep; she _knows_ herself. She doesn’t want women cleanly, or purely enough to coach them. Even the ones who remind her of the girl she used to be, brash and tough and hungry to go down in history with a Piston Cup for every day of the week. Lightning will chew up her heart, just like she’s chewed her way to the top, chewed through middle America, chewed through so many crew chiefs, chewed through teen magazines to lie naked on a bed of thorns, if if means lying at the top of the heap a little longer. 

“I want her out of my town,” she mumbles to Sally and Sheriff every chance she gets, watching Lightning haul Bessie down the road, sweating and cursing and glaring at them from where she’s strapped in behind the wheel. “Want her gone.” 

“You and her both,” Sheriff reminds you. 

Another similarity, another tarpit, another fraction of shattered mirror, seven years bad luck. 

“_After_ the road it done,” Sally reminds her, eyes wide and pleading. 

And that day cannot fucking come fast enough. 


	17. I am in love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for drinking.

Every time Lightning loses a race or fucks up, Doc lays her hand on her shoulder, shakes her gently in the pits and tells her, “You did good, kid. Don’t beat yourself up. We’ll get them next time,” or, worst of all, “hold your head high. You still make me proud,” which never fails to make something terrible swell in Lightning’s throat, choking her. Her face gets hot and her eyes sting and she does hold her head high, but only because she has to look up to the glare of the sky to keep the tears from spilling out in embarrassing rivulets down her cheeks. She hates crying in front of Doc, because it makes Doc uncomfortable, and that’s the last thing she wants. She wants—god, she doesn’t even _know_what she wants, really. Losing makes her crazy and insecure and she can feel herself coming apart at the seams, and she just _wants. _Doc solid and closer, Doc’s hands on her, Doc telling her it’s ok, that she’s not going anywhere, she’s not giving up on her. Hearing the words isn’t enough, she needs like, concrete bodily reassurance, too. 

So, the next time she comes in 4th and hyperventilates in the pit about it and all Doc offers is some gruff, conciliatory words of comfort, something _snaps. _

_“_Can you like—_hug me_ or something?!” she explodes, throwing her hands up in the air, throat thick, cheeks wet. Doc stiffens, eyes flashing as she takes a step back, like the mere _suggestion_ of touching Lightning is repellant. “I know _you’re_a robot and don’t need any physical contact to live but _I do_ and I feel like— when I lose I feel like—“ she starts fucking crying in earnest now, hands flying to her face to blot out the rest of the world, Doc’s face, which is a wide-eyed mask of bafflement reminding her she’s pathetic, she’s too needy, she’s a _failure. _

But before Lightning can even further articulate what she means, Doc is coming at her from all angles, somehow. She’s curling warm, strong arms around her shoulders and pulling her close, into the solid heat of her body, and _oh, _fuck. That’s what Lightning needed. “Sh, sh. M’sorry, kid, I thought—I didn’t think you wanted me to. But I can, if this is what you want.” 

She smooths her palm up Lightning’s spine to her quaking shoulders, then up higher, to her hair, which she pets sweetly, like Lightning is a cat or something. Her heart stops, and then she lets out a tremendous exhale, a breath she feels like she’s been holding for _months_ without realizing it. And there, she trembles against Doc’s chest, inhales the cologne and engine-grease smell of her clothes, warm and comforting. She never fucking wants to leave this space, right here. Her eyes close, and she sniffles. “It’s what I want.” 

“Ok,” Doc mumbles. “I’ll be better about that.” 

At first, Lighting’s relationship to Doc’s hugs can pass as normal. She demands them when she’s sad, or when she’s drunk, and Doc rolls her eyes and grumbles sometimes but mostly she just complies, sighing and folding Lightning into her, sometimes squeezing, sometimes rubbing circles into her back, other times patting her in that patronizing way that makes Lightning think of the way men hug each other, like softness can only occur if it’s under the guise of a fight. But if she holds on long enough, Doc will soften up and just hold her there for awhile, until their breath matches up, and Lightning will shut her eyes and just inhale the way Doc smells and just fall into the tide of bliss as long as Doc lets her get away with it. 

“Did your mom not hug you when you were a kid or something?” Doc asks once, twisting her finger up in a loose strand of Lightning’s hair and tucking it back into her bun gently. “Were you deprived of touch?” 

“I—I dunno,” Lightning muses, holding on tighter because she doesn’t want this conversation to be a segue into Doc twisting out of her grip, deciding she’s not traumatized enough to be worthy of cuddles or something. “I was hugged plenty. Just. Not since my mom passed, I guess? I never had friends who were girls so I didn’t have any sleep overs. I was a tomboy. I did sports. Dudes just smacked each other on the but and side-hugged me so I wouldn’t know they had crushes on me and feel their boners.” 

Doc laughs, and it rumbles through both of them, makes Lightning shudder pleasantly. “You’re just so…” she trails off then, hands faltering where they’re pressed to Lightning’s scapulae. 

“Needy?” Lightning supplies, tilting her head back so she can smirk up at her. “Yes. Next question.” 

She doesn’t think it’s a problem, really. She’s always proud of herself when she has female friends and it doesn’t get weird, and plus, she likes to think she’s breaking down some of Doc’s weird, butch, old-lady walls. She think’s it’s good for her, to loosen up a little. To touch people and feel warmth instead of blockading herself in her garage, her clinic. 

But eventually, it stops feeling like a healthy, good thing, and morphs into something possibly maladaptive. The thing is, Lightning doesn’t _just_ want Doc to hug her when she’s in a shitty emotional place, she wants Doc to hug her _all_the time. 

Without even really realizing it, she becomes an expert in making intentional touch seem idle, in stealing moments, in finding ways to sneak into Doc’s arms without it seeming too overtly manipulative. She knows she has a problem. She just—nothing feels _better, _or more safe, or more _absolving_ than listening to Doc’s heartbeat, lungs full of the worn-in-leather smell of her. 

It doesn’t come to a head until a cold night in February. Lightning is too tipsy to drive home after dinner at the Wheel Well with the crew, so Doc takes her home, offers up her couch. Lightning is so warm and floaty and grateful that she turns on her heel and spins into Doc’s arms the second they step into her house. “Thank you,” she murmurs, pressing her face into the crinkled, gathered skin of Doc’s neck as she clumsily shuts the door behind them, loving the softness and give under her neck. She feels Doc’s pulse speed and that makes her stomach twist a little bit, but then, Doc brushes her hand up the length of her back like she always does, rucking her shirt up a bit in the process and _oh…_oh. Lightning’s gut plummets, her heart stutters in her chest and she squeezes her thighs together reflexively where she’s standing. 

And easy as that, she’s turned on. Doc turned her on by touching her, by existing, and Lightning’s not an _idiot, _so all it takes is compounding that with the existing knowledge that Doc is her favorite person and she desperately craves her approval, her presence, her touch, to realize the full scope of her feelings in a single, terrifying moment: she loves her. She’s _in love_ with her. She has been, for a long time. 

“Oh shit,” she slurs, pulling away, gaze dialing back to lock eyes with Doc and _god, _they’re so blue, so pale. Lightning looks at her lips, then, and for just a moment, tries on the idea of kissing them. She thinks of the way Doc would cradle the back of her head in a broad palm, how her blunt nails would skirt over her scalpe, though her hair, how she’d hold her so close, how she’s taste like whiskey and salt and honey and herbs and _fuck, _Lightning is in love with her. She wants her. She doesn’t just want just her hugs or her reassurance or her company, she wants her mouth spread and hungry under her own, skating down her neck, licking up sweat from the valley between her breasts. She wants it _so bad. _

“What?” Doc asks, amused, one hand kneading gently at the small of Lightning’s back. “You forget something at the restaurant?” 

And Lightning can’t stop staring, can’t stop her eyes from sweeping over Doc in awed waves. She’s thought she was hot since the first time she saw her, but it was in this remote, objective way: Doc is a hot older butch who’s hot the in the same way all hot older butches are: Because Lightning grew up with them marking the only instances she ever recognized another gay woman in public, because they’re unapologetic, and strong, and know how to take care of shit. 

But this—-this is different. This is Doc, her friend, her _mentor. _Docin her arms, warm and solid and gazing down at her with half her mouth smirking, something alive dancing in the crystal blue of her eyes. This isn’t the_ idea_ of a hot older butch and all she represents, this is a flesh and blood woman pressed flush against her, touching her. This is _Doc. _And she wants her. She loves her. 

Lightning’s whole life makes sense at the same time and as suddenly as she wants to die. “No,” she mumbles, pressing her forehead Doc’s shoulder, breathing deep in vain efforts to steady herself. “I just—thought of something. God, m’dumb.” 

“Maybe a little,” Doc murmurs, backing her up and dumping her on the couch. “Want another drink? Or to sober up and drive home in a bit?” 

Lightning shakes her head, looks at Doc again hoping something’s changed. Instead, her gaze sticks on the way her denim shirt is rolled up to her elbows. _God damn, _it hits her like a punch. She’s never been in love before, no fucking _wonder_ it took her so long to see this for what it was. Her insides twist up, and she wants poison just as bad as she wants wine. Doc _has_ wine, though, so she asks for that. It’s all she can do.

“Make me another drink,” she says, reading her temples. “M’staying over, I think.” 


	18. from this moment on

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no triggers just cute as shit

Lightning’s said _I love you_ twice without Doc returning it. She’s all weird and humiliated and chest-achey after the fact, but she can’t _help_ it, it’s how she feels and she wants Doc to _know._ But more than that, she’s not actually capable of containing things, once they become real to her. She loves Doc and it’s taken over her whole stupid body, it’s who she _is _now_._ Faster than fast, speed, a lesbian, a woman, a driver, and in love. Desperate and turned on and ecstatic when they’re alone together, wistful and impatient and sick with longing when they’re not. She loves her, and she loves her, and she’s not gonna _pretend_she doesn’t because Doc freaks out every time she says it. 

The first time, they’re lying in bed, Lightning naked and sweat-dewy with her blonde hair a wreck all over Doc’s pillows, Doc still fully clothed, staring at the ceiling with her still-wet hand resting over heart. “I love you,” Lightning murmurs as she squirms closer, pressing her forehead into Doc’s shoulder, breathing in the smell of sex and cologne from her sweater. 

Doc makes a sound in her throat, something between a cough and a laugh. “No you don’t, kid,” she mumbles, reaching out palming up Lightning’s arm lightly, patronizingly. “You’ve just never been fucked how you deserve. Maybe this will make you quit picking up straight girls.” 

Lightning realizes, in this moment, that Doc doesn’t return the depth or passion of her feelings. Her heart sinks, and she frowns against her arm, thinking that she doesn’t _blame her, _not really. She’s young, and a mess, and she cares so fucking much about what everyone else in the world thinks of her that she flirts with men, plays a game Doc was self-respecting enough to quit cold turkey.

So, she doesn’t expect Doc to love her back, even if she wants it more than anything in the world. Still, she doesn’t seem to be able to keep the wild, messy truth of it locked up, no matter how hard she tries. The second time it slips out Doc shakes her head at her, eyes wide as she orders, “Stop saying that.” 

With a sick stomach and a sunken heart, Lightning _tries,_ for awhile, to bite it back every time surfaces. But she’s just not that sort of _girl. _She’s not silent, or self-denying, or ashamed, or stoic. _ S_o inevitably, she says it again. This time, she’s leaving Doc’s house, wearing a borrowed turtleneck since her clavicles and throat are marked up in dapples, lovely marks in the shape of Doc’s mouth. She hugs her in the door-frame, not wanting to leave, so without meaning to she murmurs, “M’gonna miss you.” 

“It’s like, less than 24 hours. You’ll live,” Doc assures her, kissing the top of her head. 

“M’sorry, I just. I love you,” she spills out. 

Doc freezes before she sighs, hooks her arm around Lightning’s lower back and walks her back in through the threshold of her house. “Sorry,” Lightning says, wincing, but Doc doesn’t actually seem _mad_ as much as she seems…exhausted. Worn out. Like she’s been running and running and finally, it’s time to collapse. “Sorry,” Lightning whispers again anyway. 

Saying nothing, Doc swings the door shut behind Lightning and then pushes her up against it with her body, breath hot and soft in the shell her ear as she mumbles, “What m’I gonna do with you?” 

Lightning raises a tentative hand, combs her fingers through the back of Doc’s short, bristly hair. “Kiss me?” she asks hopefully. 

Doc exhales, and it turns into a sad, broken laugh. Lightning thinks back to the first time she confessed on the bed, both of them lit up by the cold spill of the moon, and holds on tighter. 

“You must know how fucking in love with you I am,” Doc breathes in a rush then, rubbing her face into Lightning’s hair, her shoulder, her throat where the pulse is suddenly speeding so hard she’s dizzy. “How in love with you I’ve been since–hell. Since you showed up here and fucked everything up. And it’s hard—it’s _impossible _to remind myself you’ll leave eventually when you keep trying to convince us both you feel the same way. That this isn’t some phase for you.”

_What. Fucking what. _

Lightning reels back, head thumping against the door, hands all over Doc’s shoulders, her face, checking if she’s real. “What—what the _fuck. _Just because you’re older than me does _not_ mean you get to tell me what’s a _phase,” _she snaps, making fists in Doc’s collar, twisting the fabric up because _god, _fuck, she loves her back. She’s loved her all this time, and was just too stubborn to accept that Lightning is a real adult with real feelings_. “Listen,” _she announces, voice fierce even as it wavers. 

Doc’s eyes are so blue right now, and they darken as she speaks, which they always do when she’s listening. Lightning counts this as a small triumph. “I’m listening,” she murmurs.

“I haven’t spent my whole fucking life waiting to fall in love to have you tell me I don’t know what I’m feeling. I _do_ love you, m’not confused about it one bit, and you can bitch and moan about how unlikely that is all you want, but it’s not gonna change. I love you. I love you so much it makes me _crazy, _ok? And from this moment on, you’re gonna stop moping about being old and just accept my feelings are real and they’re not going away and that’s just the way it is.” 

Doc smiles, just a little bit. “You should try telling me off more often,” she mumbles, thumbing over the corner of Lightning’s mouth tenderly. “It’s cute.” 

“And as hard as you try to convince me otherwise, _you’re _cute,” Lightning declares, pitching forward and kissing her hard. Doc kisses back, gives under her like sand crumbling beneath the tide and _fuck, _Lightning can feel it, can feel the truth, hot and sweet and scared in her mouth. She _does_ feel the same way. She’s just been holding back, holding her own heart close, locking it up in her chest. _Give it to me_ Lightning thinks desperately, palming over her shoulders, down her arms, until she interlaces their fingers. “I love you,” she says again, mumbling it into their kiss, chest tight and thrumming with the thrill of knowing things are going to be _different_ from now on. That she’s going to get _all_ of Doc, not just the scraps she has to beg for. 

“I love you too, babygirl,” Doc says gently, cupping her face, eyes shut in awe like she can’t _believe_ she gets more than scraps, too. “Love you so much.” 


	19. don't fence me in

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pining, angst, unresolved

Doc moves to Radiator Springs for the miles and miles of desert. She feels surrounded by sprawling gold and red, surrounded by sun and dry-heat and scrub brush and cactus and empty, twisting, under-maintained roads and she _likes_ it that way. It’s a lonely sore of surrounded, an unconfined sort of surrounded and that’s what she needs, she thinks. To escape from cities where people look at her and know she’s a dyke and not a man, towns where people remember her crash. All she wants is to move through crowds undetected, to find a small community of people just like her. People who are running from things, hiding out in the great vast swath of the west. People who don’t give a shit about what she looks like or does behind closed doors as long as she’s a hard worker and a good neighbor. 

She finds Radiator Springs and it’s exactly what she’s been longing for, ever since she left Thomasville. She loves the way the snow settles onto the top of the butte like powdered sugar in the winter, she loves the hares who hide from the high-noon heat in her yard under the jade plant in the summer, she loves the sandy winds, the fearsome sun, the skies so blue it rivals the rich overwhelm of the sea. She loves that half the patients who visit her tiny private practice are gay too, but no one ever _says_ anything about it. There’s no pressure to be political, no pressure to march in the streets, no pressure to make declarations or wave a flag. They’re all just _people_ together living their lives, looking out for each other quiet and steady.

Thats why she’s so _scared_ of Lightning McQueen when she firsts shows up in town. It’s just not her fame, her attitude, the ugliest parts of racing she’s dragging back into Doc’s world like a bad dream. It’s the way she feels like a _fence, _in the otherwise wild-wide freedom of the desert. She brings a different sort of civilization with her, a cosmopolitan speed, barriers and limits and labels and _boxes._ The first time she sees Doc, she recoils, before recognition slides slow and strange across her dirty face. And then she actively, calculatingly sizes her up. Makes assumptions about her, no doubt. Decides who Doc is, what she likes, how she views the world. 

It’s fucking invasive. Doc feels trapped, tied down and split open like a dissection rat. So, she immediately wants to prove Lightning _wrong. _She wants to defy her expectations. For the first time in her entire life, Doc ever so briefly wishes she had some secret husband stashed away for the sole purpose of shattering the story Lightning’s written about her in her pretty blonde head. That only lasts until she beats her at a race, and she gets to see Lightning McQueen stunned and furious, her pink cheeks flushed red, her fists balled up at the wheel. Expectations shattered, face a mask of shock and outrage. 

_M’not what you think I am, kid. Don’t fence me in, _she thinks, dusting her hands off before she drives back into town in her still dented Hudson Hornet, the engine purring loud enough it echoes off the sheet-rock of the butte, sounding like thunder. The car underwent full body repair after she crashed, and it doesn’t drive perfect, but it’s good enough. Good enough for beating pretty girls on dirt tracks. Good enough for dashing a fence to bits with a bent fender. 


	20. I concentrate on you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> straight up fluff

Lightning studies Doc. 

She’s gotten really good at it, actually. Now that she’s decided there are things in the world worth learning, people worth learning _from, _she’s committed to becoming the very best listener and note-taker in the whole fucking word. She’s gonna absorb every last bit of expertise and she can. She’s gonna _concentrate, _even if it kills her. 

Unfortunately, she starts to notice things that are wholly unrelated to racing. 

The way Doc’s eyes are so blue they make her mouth dry. The turned down lines at the corner of her mouth which frame it like brackets when she laughs, which she’s done more and more since they forged this tentative friendship. The rough, easy competence of her hands while she does car-things, pops the hood and talks engine stuff because she’s says _you can’t drive something as best you can if you don’t know how it works, kid. _The way she smells like cologne and leather and medical soap, and it’s the cleanest, most comforting smell in the world. 

Lightning gets stressed behind the wheel sometimes, but if she just thinks about Doc, her advice, her gravelly voice, her eyes her mouth her hands her _smell, _it goes away. She settles into certainty, into the new, strange knowledge that she doesn’t have to have her own back all the time, because for the first time in her life, someone_ else_ has it. 

She doesn’t even realize her feelings have grown and solidified without her permission until Doc’s car breaks down between Phoenix and Houston, on a stretch of road in desolate gut of the desert. It’s the middle of the night and the middle of nowhere and they have to wait _hours_ for the tow truck, so they sit on the hood together and huddle under Doc’s padded flannel for warmth, watching the stars. 

Lightning’s head drifts to Doc’s shoulder, and everything smells like cologne and leather and medical soap, and she should be stressed, she should be _annoyed _they broke down on the way to a race_, _but she’s not. She’s so happy, right here, settled against Doc’s side. She gazes up at her, about to say something, but her gaze falls on the flat line of her mouth, the soft looking cracks in her lips, and she realizes that for _months, _she’s wanted to kiss her. 

She licks her lips and pitches off a cliff, letting it happen, giving into her hunger now that she knows what it is because she’s _never_ stopped herself from taking something she craved _before_ this. Why should she start now? It doesn’t occur to her Doc might stop her. She doesn’t even get that far, she doesn’t think. She just tilts her head back and presses her lips to Doc’s, eyes sliding shut to block out the stars. 

Doc’s lips are so soft and Lightning makes a sound. And then, Doc’s pulling away, startled, she’s canting away from the pressure of Lightning’s body. “What the hell are you doing?” she asks gruffly hand spread wide along the side of her face, folding down the shell of her ear with her thumb.

Lightning’s eyes are still closed. She wants more more more, so much fucking more. “I’m—I wanted to kiss you,” she admits, like this changes everything. Like it smoothes away the uncertain folds bunching between them. 

Doc laughs mirthlessly and lets her go, rocks away from her. The hood of the car creaks under her shifting weight. “You can’t just do things because you want to, kid. You might. You might break someone’s heart.” 

Lightning presses her face into Doc’s shoulder, inhales from her shirt, undeterred. There’s nothing else in the world, really, to think about or consider besides _this. _Ink blotting out a page, dusk giving way to night. Doc and Doc and _Doc_, the only thing she’s been able to see since she _met_ her, really. “I think m’in love with you,” she murmurs. Then, because the first time it didn’t come out right, “I’m in love with you.” 

Doc is quiet for a few moments, and then she settles closer, caving in like sand beneath a short-tide, pressing her lips into Lightning’s hair. “You’re not. You can’t be. You just know I’m in love with _you_ and want to make me happy, because—”

Lightning looks up at her, heart pounding, hands itching. She doesn’t want to waste time. She doesn’t want to play games. She wants to win a race, she wants to kiss the mouth she’s been concentrating on, _studying _so hard she could draw it from memory, if she knew how to draw. “Nope,” she says before licking over the seam of her lips and pressing home hard, the flannel falling off their shoulders to the car hood. “I am,” she says between hungry, messy presses of her lips. 

Doc stops talking, and sifts her fingers through Lightning’s hair, and a tow truck is coming, and so is dawn. But Lightning cant think about any of that, right now. She’s concentrating. 


	21. I've got you under my skin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> angst, pining, #butchproblems

Doc tries so fucking hard to resist falling in love with Lightning. 

She’s bad news, anyway. Too young and too pretty too fast and too reckless. Plus, she flirts up a storm and Doc knows full well any girl who pushes her tits together and prances around in her underwear batting her lashes asking how she looks is trouble. Girls like Lightning mess with old women like her, think over-fifty butches are desperate, only because _they themselves _can’t imagine age and butchness being attractive. 

They think it’s some game, some great _favor, _to tease. To crack the exterior and prod the softness inside, to play heartstrings like a violin and taunt with flashing teeth and blood red lips because of course, it’s not _going_ anywhere. Girls like Lightning don’t want women like Doc. 

And Doc wants to badly to _not_ want Lightning in return, but in spite of every effort not to, she cannot _help_ but let her get under her skin. 

By the time she admits it, she’s already in too deep. They’re sharing a hotel room because she’s convinced herself she can handle the proximity, but _one day_ into their week long stay in Nashville, she’s drowning. 

There’s the smell of Lightning’s perfume in the bathroom after she gets ready, the smudges of lipstick and foundation on the otherwise white washcloth by the sink. There’s a soft drum of her nails against Doc’s leg as they sit side by side on the bed going over stats they took at practice, one of many sweet, idle, thoughtless touches because Lightning is _always, _always touching. 

Doc can’t handle it. 

The third day, she decides to gently shove her hand away from the crook of her arm. It settled there as they were walking from the hotel bar to the pool, Doc in all her clothes, Lightning in a white, practically translucent bikini because she likes to make Doc look at her, likes to flaunt because she thinks Doc is pathetic enough to be grateful for that or something. “Sorry,” Lightning says, frowning. “I don’t—I didn’t mean anything by it.” 

“That’s why you gotta stop,” Doc says sternly, emboldened by bourbon, by the sudden cool flush of the air bringing along with it the smell of chlorine at they push outside. “It’s not—I don’t like to be teased. You’re not gonna _kiss_ me or anything, so it’s just—it’s disrespectful, and annoying. Stop.” 

Lightning is quiet, shoulders cut and pale against the night as she looks out on the glow of the pool. “If I _was_ going to kiss you, would it still be annoying?” she asks after a moment, voice muffled by the breeze, or maybe by something else. 

Doc’s stomach drops, but she scoffs anyway. “You’re_ not_, kid, don’t—”

Lightning spins around on her heels, brow furrowed and jaw set in determination before she throws her arms around Doc’s neck and presses their mouths flush. 

The stars watch, and Doc feels like she’s made of them, suddenly. She’s weak so she kisses back without even meaning to, in spite of every cell in her body screaming to resist, to tear away, to shove. Instead her lips fall open and Lightning’s tongue sweeps hot and wet across the lower one before she rips away, trembling, hair carried across her face in fly-away strands of blonde. “Oh my god,” she says, covering her lip-stick smeared mouth with her hand. “I didn't—I wasn’t going to _do_ that, I _know_ you don’t want it, you’ve made it _so fucking_ clear how you feel and I just—m’so sorry.” 

Doc stares, and Lightning stares back, and the sound of the hot top drowns out the sound of thundering hearts but they’re there, scared and speeding. Doc realizes maybe she’s been unfair this whole fucking time. Maybe she was making assumptions about the sort of girl lightning was, just like she assumed Lightning was doing of her. Maybe _she’s_ been trouble this whole time. Maybe _she_ was getting under Lightning’s skin, too. “C’mere,” Doc finally makes herself say, holding out her arms. “Lemme tell you how I feel, ok? I think you’ve got it all wrong.” 


	22. so in love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> puke and drinking tw but mostly this is SOOOO fluffy. also takes place after cars 3.

They’re in old Vegas at the Golden Nugget. Lightning just came out of the bathroom and she’s stumbling, wiping her lips on the back of her hand, hair a mess and eyes still watering. “I threw up,” she announces, hooking her arm in Doc’s and leaning into her lapel. Doc can smell the gin and cheap hand soap on her, alongside her perfume, her sweat. She kisses her hair, inhaling it all. “One too many martinis. I’m a mess.” 

“If it makes you feel any better, so I am. I just lost our last hundred at the Blackjack table,” she admits, curling her arms around Lightning’s lower back, crushing her close. 

Lightning sways. “Aren’t we a pair?” she says with a lazy, crooked smile. 

There are lines around her mouth, at the corners of her eyes. Her forty-third birthday was last month and she cried about it, just like she’s cried at each of Doc’s more recent birthdays. Lightning hates the idea of getting older, of lost time, or ticking clocks. Doc gets it, on some level, but she also can’t care about things hurting, anymore. She’s got to wake up and fall asleep next to the most beautiful girl she’s ever seen for the last ten years. She got to do an interview with her and Cruz Ramirez for _Curve _Magazine when Lightning publicly came out as a lesbian alongside her announcement that she was retiring from racing. They have a three woman _legacy_, now, and these are the sort of things she thought could never, ever happen in her lifetime. Love. Living honestly. An openly lesbian NASCAR rookie and her two openly lesbian mentors. Its incomprehensible, all of it, but it’s also her _life. _Her present, and her future, and the world she will leave behind. 

So, she wipes Lightning tears when she cries, tells her there’s so much to be proud of, to be amazed by. And Lightning holds her close and presses her face into her chest and listens as she sniffles, and another day will go by. 

“Should I get another drink?” Lightning asks, thumbing the lines of Doc’s jaw clumsily, looking up at her with wide unfocused eyes. She’s gained a little weight since she stopped racing and her stomach presses round and gorgeous into the front of her dress, and Doc wants to kiss it, wants to spread her out in the suite at Caesars Palace and marvel at all the things she has to pray to.

“Nah,” she says. “Let’s go back to the strip. Miss the way you look naked,” she murmurs into the shell of her ear. 

Lightning trills in the back of her throat, and then she meows, drunk and embarrassing and so, so fucking perfect. “My god, you saucy old woman. Fine. As long as you make me a wine spritzer in our room.” 

They walk up Fremont street arm in arm, and Lightning’s hair is one hundred different colors, gold reflecting the endless entourage of red, blue, green. She’s a kaleidoscope and Doc thinks she’s the prettiest, brightest shining thing in this whole fucking city and she has to tell her. “M’so in love with you,” she announces, twirling a loose curl around her finger as they weave their way through the crowd, fingers clasped. 

Lightning twists around and grins at her, eyes glittering. “Even though I’m retired and fat and _old_ now?” 

Doc shrugs, squeezes her hand. “Old’s not so bad.” 

Lightning laughs at the sky. “I love you too,” she says to the stars, and Doc feels infinite. 


	23. ace in the hole

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I knew shit about poker I would continue this one!!! no tw it's short I just like the idea of Lightning being an embarrassing flirt and Doc pretending she doesn't notice.

Doc is teaching Lightning how to cheat in poker, and it shouldn’t be turning her on so much, but is _is. _

It’s her competent hands with the loose skin over broad knuckles as she shuffles the deck, all her easily, effortlessly accumulated knowledge. “There are no fancy moves,” she says bridging the cards and letting them flutter into the cage of her thumbs. Lightning licks her lips, scooting closer. “It’s all about lying…talking. Convincing people you’ve got it or don’t. Doesn’t matter a _bit _what the cards are.” 

Lightning brackets her torso with her arms, using them to push her tits together and hoping Doc notices the way they’re pressed into the heft of her cleavage. She’s always doing shit like this, showing off her body, praying one day Doc will get curious enough to flirt back. “So I don’t need an ace in the hole or anything?” she asks, watching Doc’s forearms, the way her sleeves are rolled up to the elbow, the gather and drag of sinew and skin. Her heart aches. 

“No, you just need to be a sweet talking liar,” Doc assures her, winking, and _fuck, _that should be illegal when your eyes are that blue. 

Lightning chews her lips. “Ok,” she says, gathering up the discard pile along with her hand, shuffling the meager handful. “Let’s play.” She says it with a lilt, with soft lips, with half-lidded eyes. 

If Doc notices , she doesn’t say anything. Lightning hope, _hopes_ she’s bluffing.


	24. day and night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pining and sappiness.

You’re an early riser, you’ve always been. 

You used to like it, rolling out of bed before dawn to brew your coffee, chased from the heat of your bed by the aching in your hips and knees every day of winter since you turned forty five. You like the ritual of watching the sunrise, the fading moon giving way to brightening skies. You like being awake before the rest of the world is. You like being alone. 

Or, you used to. You only begin to resent those lonely mornings after you fall in love with Lightning McQueen, and your world is reduced to the crystalline, shining moments when you get to be around her, and the dead time which stretches indefinitely between them. Getting up early feels like a chore, a _waste_because all you’re thinking about is her. Dreaming of when you get to see her at the butte or the track or Flo’s in a few hours for practice, dreaming of the golden glow of her hair in the early morning light, the way her laugh sounds ricocheting off of asphalt, her goofy little dances she does between stretches or circuit training to pump herself up. Getting up before dawn means a longer wait. 

It’s a strange way to feel, at seventy one. You’re not sure you like it, the way your routine is being disturbed, the way you’re _changing. _But, you’re good at swallowing things you don’t particularly like, so you deal with it. You drink your coffee bitter and black and think of her hair, the white flash of her teeth. So many superior forms of light paling beside the sunrise. 

That all changes when you figure out she loves you back. 

Now, you don’t get up early at all. Or you do, but you stay in bed. You nestle your aching knees up to the curve of her ass to warm the joints, you press your face to the back of her neck and smoothe down the wispy blonde hairs there as she sleeps, you curl an arm around her chest and cup the weight of her tits in your broad palm and kiss up and down her spine until she stirs and rouses and rolls over, smelling like this morning’s sleep and last night’s sex, eyes half-lidded and body curling, twisting, begging for more. 

You kiss her and you spread her out and you have her again and again. You hold her close while she snores against your neck, you roll her over to knead the stiff planes of muscle drawn tight over her scapulae, you hold her thighs apart and drown. You pull her hair, and kiss her scars, and somehow, she kisses yours, too. She blinks awake at eight am sometimes, and when you ask her if she wants to go back to sleep she’ll say _nah. Would miss you too much_ and then you’ll drink coffee _together, _on the couch with her head against your shoulder, blinking sleepily, playing with your hands. 

Other mornings you fall back asleep while she traces idle patterns onto your chest. You can’t remember the last time that happened, the last time you didn’t feel like you were failing at something if you didn’t beat the rest of the town to morning. If you didn’t do something productive as soon as you were able. But with her there in your sheets you don’t miss the sunrises at all, really. You have everything you need right here. 


	25. you're the top

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> drinking and insecurity tw!

Usually drinking loosens Doc up, softens her around the edges so she’s more likely to smile, to pull Lightning into her lap at home or grab her ass when no one’s looking if they’re out. 

There are some times, though, when it makes her self-deprecating, fatalistic. Usually when she had vodka instead of her usual gin or whiskey, or on nights when they’re doing press and Lightning has an entourage of fans following her, hanging on her every word. Keeping her away from her friends, from reality. From Doc. 

On these nights Doc will pet her hair, hold her face, look at her like she thinks she’s got a foot already out the door and say, _“God, _why are you even with me? What the hell do you see in a old woman, when you can have...when you—”

And Lightning has to cut her off, every time, no matter how often they’ve had this conversation. “I don’t _want_ anyone, want you,” she’ll promise, kissing the taste of too many cosmopolitans from Doc’s soft, slack lips. “C’mon.” 

“Hm,” Doc murmurs, taking a fistful of blonde hair like it’s gold, looking at the shining spill of it in her palm longingly. _You don’t have to long, _Lightning thinks in a raw desperate rush_. You’ve got me. All of me. “_I just—don’t understand. You’re young, kid, you’re beautiful. You don’t have to stay here.” 

“I know I don’t _have_ to,” Lightning shoots back, rolling her eyes. “I want to. You gotta know—you _must_ already know that I think you’re the greatest. The fucking top, man. You’re the Fabulous Hudson Hornet. Racing’s first lady. You’re the hottest woman I’ve ever seen and I can’t believe you think there’s a single chance I’d ever run from that.” 

“You’re just flattering me,” Doc grumbles even though her eyes are shining, sparkling with something close to amusement. “So I’ll feel better.” 

“No! What in the hell do you want me to say? That I’m a useless mess of who’d still be firing crew chiefs and mouthing off to sponsors and fucking my opponents girlfriends if you hadn’t found me and dusted me off, polished me up?” 

“No,” she sighs then, thumbing over the upturned corner of Lightning’s mouth, like even the coaxed version of her smile is soothing, grounding. “I’d never expect you to put yourself down to build me up, baby girl.” 


	26. what is this thing called love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> body insecurity/age angst tw.

You cannot fucking believe this happened to you. 

You thought you were made from scar tissue. That nothing got in and nothing got out, your blood stuck inside your steadily withering body until you died old and alone and relatively unscathed. And maybe there would be no more love in the remainder of your life, but there would_ also_ be no more heartbreak, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. 

You were built to drift towards and eventually off the edge of the world. Not to weather storms, not to _sink. _

So that’s why it’s such a shocking, terrible thing to fall in love with Lightning McQueen. Why it leaves you gasping and terrified and up at night, staring at the ceiling of hotel rooms with your hands crossed over your chest, listening to her snore, thinking about the red silk eye mask she wears to sleep and imagining the softness of it pressed to the center of your spine because you’d let Lightning McQueen hold you, if she wanted to. If it wasn’t an impossible thing. 

You realize at seventy one years old you’ve never actually been in love before. You’ve _loved _women, you’ve_ wanted_ women, you’ve _used_ women to keep you warm at night, or to keep you from feeling lonely when you moved to a new city, or to remind yourself you still felt, you're still alive. You’ve wanted to be in love, and then, eventually, you were grateful it hadn’t happened to you. Things were simpler, this way. Safer. Building yourself around your job and living for _that, _instead of someone else, someone who could leave. 

She speeds into the desert and ruins _everything_. Comes from left field and fucks up your formerly air-tight self concept, and before you even realize this is different than attraction, than irritation, than investment, than obsession. Before you realize it you’re in too deep to claw your way out. You’re in love with her; there’s nothing else to call it. You feel like you’re dying. You feel like you’ve never felt your heartbeat inside your body, or the rush of blood in your veins, until _now. _You feel like at seventy one, you’re only now just opening your eyes.

And of course, she’s all you can see. Her long legs, the dimple in her thigh she always rubs at like she wishes she were smoother, like she wishes she was still twenty three and capable of drinking a six pack over the course of a night without waking up hungover. You see the self-punishing dig of her fingers into her own skin, and you want to move those chewed up nails away and kiss the spots on her body she hates. You see the mole in the hollow of her throat. The few grey hairs woven into the blonde growing from her left temple. The crown on her tooth she got after she crashed at Irwindale and cracked the very tip of her incisor. You see her uneven tits, one hanging lower when she walks around your house without a bra. You see her laugh lines, her too-tight deltoids, the way her fingers shake when she leaves the roll cage after winning. You see her insecurity, her self-doubt, the manner in which her arrogance has always functioned as a mask for her loneliness. You see it all, and _still, _you love her. You guess that’s what love _is. _Why it different than everything else. 

You hate it, but it’s not a force you can outrun. All you can do it lie down on the track and wait for the heartbreak. You close your eyes, and see her still. 


	27. why won't you behave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> angst, sort of unrequited (not really???), casual relationship stuff. I want to write more of this one maybe.

“I want to go on vacation,” Lightning complains, kicking off her Nike slider, unrolling the window, and sticking her foot outside to wiggle her red-enameled toes in the desert air. “Somewhere warm, like Hawaii. Cancun.” 

Doc glances sidelong at her from the driver’s side, grinding her teeth at the way her delicate ankle looks twisting in a neat circle. “What, not warm enough here for you?” They’re driving from Radiator Springs to Los Angeles for a race, and there’s nothing but dead land and burning sand and sun and scorching for _hours _ahead of them. 

“Plenty warm, I guess,” she sighs, sticking the other leg outside along with the first and reclining the passenger’s side. Then she turns her formerly backwards cap to the front so the bill blocks the sun from her eyes. “Just _bored. _Tired of working. It would be fine, you know, if it was just_ racing._ But it never is, there’s everything _else, _and m’bored of it. Bored of schmoozing ugly rich men. Bored of lying,” she says then, picking at a scab on her knee. Doc watches in the periphery of her own vision, stomach tight because every idle thing Lightning does twists up inside of her. “I want to run away with you,” she adds then, shining the cool, begging blue of her eyes right onto Doc while she _pouts. _

It’s unfair, mostly because she could _have_ that, if she fucking behaved. She could have her vacation time and her stolen moments with Doc if she was willing to commit to it. If she didn’t waffle back and forth, claim she wasn’t _ready_ to settle down, that she was _too young_ for something serious, that she was just _having fun _when she let Doc tie her to bed and spread her out and make her come apart five, six, seven times a night under her tongue_. _Doc knows better than to trust these moments, when Lightning seems to forget her fickleness and her flightiness and she pretends she’s the sort of woman who’d be _happy_ running off into the sunset with her seventy two year old crew chief she sometimes lets fuck her. When she pretends this is what _she_ wants, and _Doc_ is the one holding out on her.

“Oh, right,” Doc scoffs, flicking the blinker on and merging less smoothly than she often does. It jars Lightning’s shins against the window frame. “How long would you last in Cancun with me before you got bored of _that, _too? You’re always getting bored, kid. M’not dumb enough to think I’d be the thing that cured you of that.” 

Lightning frowns, and crosses her arms, pillowing her head against the window and crossing er ankles defiantly. “Forget I ever said anything,” she grumbles. 

Doc turns back to the road, but she’s not likely to forget. 


	28. it's alright with me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw for drunk self destructive sex, lightning/OFC, and past Salqueen. super angsty!

Lightnings drunk and she wants to fuck and she want to _feel_ and to _hell_ with everything else. To hell with heartbreak, and growth, and shedding all her shitty coping mechanisms in favor of something more _mature_ or well adjusted or whatever. She _did_ that. She did it and it _didn’t_ _work, _because here she is, ripped open and hurt just like she _knew_ she’d be if she ever tore her mask off and let someone in. Here she is, in love with the only person she has zero chance with. 

This is what happened: Lightning came to Radiator Spring and realized how goddamned tired she was of running from authenticity. So, she struggled through her bad habits and her whole long history of breaking girl’s hearts and using them for a single night of fleeting sensation before throwing them away. She decided she didn’t want to _be_ that sort of person anymore, so she changed. She cleaned up her act, she forced herself to be _real, _to open up, to let someone in. And that person was Sally. 

And then, she realized Sally was a defense mechanism, too. Sally was the wall she put up so that she could tell herself she’d changed. That she wasn’t a slut or a player or a heartbreaker or a home wrecker anymore, she was a _good_girlfriend; she was a grown woman. It worked, sort of, until Sally packed her bags and left Lightning with the single haunting sentence, _I love you but you love Doc and until you realize and get over that, this just isn’t gonna work._

After that, everything got fucked up. Lightning’s carefully constructed defenses came crashing down. She was suffocated in the rubble and dust of knowing, _knowing, _Sally was right.

But she’s _done_ her soul searching or whatever. She’s done. She’s _realized _she loves Doc, or whatever, but she _can’t_ get over it. She can’t even unpack it. Now that she knows what it _is_ all she feels is sickness and stinging and aches, poison in her chest every time she so much as looks at Doc and the _impossibility_ hits her again: the fact she’s so obsessed with this person who will never look at her as more than some fixer-upper rookie girl to pour knowledge into. The fact she’s in over her head, looking out of her league. That she fucks girls and hates men but she’ll never, _ever_ be a good enough lesbian to win someone like Doc over. 

So, she won the race this weekend instead. Doc held her close and kissed her hair after just like a _mother would,_ whispering _proud of you, kid, _and wasn’t enough, it’s _never_ enough. It’s doesn’t even touch upon the depth and magnitude of what she really wants so _fuck it._It’s alright with her, to go back to who she was. To drown her loneliness in fly-over state twenty somethings and liquor. 

She gets drunk on shots of cheap vodka the hotel bartender is giving her for free. She scans the crowd for the exact type of girl she always used to go for: mid-western, sheltered, probably gay but dead certain she was straight. Just _waiting_ for her favorite NASCAR racer and middle school hero to come out of the woodwork and buy her a drink and kiss her in front of her boyfriend and then say, with her mouth close to the shell of her ear, _this is boring, right? Let’s get out of here. Want to come up to my penthouse suite?_

And then, there, while whatever city she’s stuck in sprawls bright and glittering beneath the floor to ceiling windows, Lightning fucks, she _feels._ She loses herself, so she doesn’t have to think about herself, sp she doesn’t have to occupy her own mind. It’s a mess, anyway. A mess of guilt where Sally is concerned and weird, embarrassed, shamed longing for approval where Doc is concerned and _fuck it. _Fuck it all. She ruined things with one in favor of never being able to have the other, so. Fuck it. Fuck them both.

This girl twisted up in her sheets is blonde just like her, she’s wearing mascara and red lipstick just like her. It’s the same as kissing her own reflection in the mirror: as cold, and sterile, and meaningless. The girl is gasping, though, so maybe Lightning hasn’t lost her touch. She licks her lips apart, she smooths a hand up to her tit, and waits to see what will happen. 

This girl isn’t Sally, and she’s _certainly_ not Doc. Which means, really, that she’s fucking perfect. Because Lightning’s _tired_ of being real. She’s done with it.


	29. you'd be so easy to love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> drinking tw. I really want to continue this one, too.

It’s fucking _baffling_ to Lightning that Doc doesn’t have a girlfriend. 

She can imagine her so distinctly, if she tries. Some elegant, movie-star type of woman, long and thin with still-blonde hair run through with grey giving it a shiny, metallic look in the light. She would have been the femme everyone wanted to dance with in those lesbian bars in the 40s, if she had been alive in the 40s. She’d have high cheek bones and drawn lips and cold eyes that only seemed kind once you knew her, still beautiful no matter how old she got. She’d look like Katherine Hepburn and Doc would hold doors for her and worship her and together, they’d be picture perfect. 

Lightning imagines this woman in such detail and with such regularity that she sometimes forgets she’s not real. Then she decides that maybe she _is_ real, maybe she just died and Doc is still heartbroken over it, or maybe she had to move to Europe for witness protection because she was actually a secret agent, or some other outlandish fate. It just. It seems so _unlikely_ that there wasn’t or _isn’t _some beautiful woman in Doc’s life. Doc is a fucking catch. 

They’re in her backyard one day, drinking upturned Coronas in Margaritas, because it’s summer and its hot and Doc has one of those fancy uni-tasker Margarita makers and Lightning was desperate to know if it still worked.

It did, luckily. So they’re drinking, and Lightning’s watching Doc through her sunglasses, worrying her lower lip between her teeth and thinking, as she often does, about this woman that she imagines up for Doc. Her fantasy, her ghost. “Hey,” she says, rolling over onto her stomach on the lounger, untying her bikini top so her back can get evenly tanned. She’s got a little headache from the booze and the sun, and maybe it’s affecting her judgement, because she decides she’s brave enough to ask something she’s never asked before. “Why don’t you have some hot wife?” 

Doc looks over at her, scoffing, eyes unreadable behind her aviators. “Huh? What makes you think I’d be able to snag a wife at all, let alone a hot one? You’re crazy, kid. I haven’t even been on a date since like…1979.” 

Lightning frowns. “What do you mean? Why _wouldn’t_ you have a hot wife? I always figured you did and she died tragically or something which was why no one ever talked about her.” 

Doc actually laughs, shaking her head. “M’good at picking girls up at bars, taking them out once, and never hearing from them again. That’s about it.” She takes a sip of her drink, then fishes the mostly empty Corona bottle out of it and sucks the crushed ice off the neck off of it before chucking it across the yard. “Guess m’hard to love.” 

That doesn’t sit right, really. Lightning loves Doc so pure and hard and fast, like racing, like winning, and she didn’t even have to work at it. It came naturally, because Doc is lovable. 

Lightning’s stomach clenches up uncomfortably, the sun suddenly too hot against her back. She rolls over, folding her arm over her tits so she doesn’t show them to Doc accidentally. She realizes in this exact moment, however, with the taste of triple sec and lemon-lime mixer on her tongue, that she wouldn’t mind the idea of Doc _looking_ at her like that. Not at all. Not now that she knows she’s _actually_ single, and not just hung up on her dead wife who looks like Katherine Hepburn. Lightning shivers, even though she’s sweating. 

“I dunno. I think you’re pretty easy to love,” she admits. After all, she’s constructed a whole imaginary love life for Doc. A whole imaginary woman with beautiful pale skin and delicate hands with slender fingers where she wears a ring Doc got her from a pawn shop in Vegas on some brilliant gambling trip in the 80s Lightning imagined for them. They’d win at the slot machines, or maybe at the blackjack table, and Doc would tip her girl back, give her so many whiskey kisses, and tell her over and over again _I love you, my good luck charm.Gonna spoil you, gonna take care of you. Gonna love you forever. _It occurs to Lightning in this moment, that perhaps in creating this woman, she was running from the reality of wishing she _was_ her, and the pain of knowing she’d never be. 

Suddenly, the tequila feels hot and unsteady in her stomach. 

“That’s very generous of you,” Doc snorts. 

Lightning doesn’t answer. She’s too busy imagining being on Doc’s arm at racing banquets, what it might feel like for Doc to hold doors for her, how she probably wouldn’t actually even be very good at that. She’s not some pretty, fancy woman who will age gracefully. She likes to drink Corona in her margaritas, she races cars, she has callouses and burn scars from hot-wiring them as a teenager. She would never be the belle of a bar, she probably would have been closer to Doc’s side of things if she’d ever gotten to hang out at those bars, wearing Levis and working as a mechanic, asking only the prettiest, most delicate girls to dance. She has long hair now, she wears lipstick, she _feels _like she’s femme if she had to choose, but she can’t imagine herself as _enough _of a _real_ femme for Doc. Not compared to the woman she invented for her. 

Still, part of her likes the idea so_ much. _Of Doc looking at her. Doc touching the small of her back gently, or guiding her thighs apart to sink between them. _Fuck. _Of tipping her back and giving her so many whiskey kisses. “If you _did _have some hot girlfriend, what would she be like?” she asks, picking at a hangnail. 

“Fun,” Doc answers automatically, shrugging. “Hell, she doesn’t even have to be hot. What’s that _mean_ anyway…women are women. I can find something pretty in any woman.” 

_Even me?_ Lightning thinks with a weird, choking rush. “Fun?” 

“Yeah,” Doc says, settling back into her own lounger, crossing her ankles, pressing the rim of her glass to her lips. “Not too uptight. Likes the outdoors. Doesn’t mind that I drink like a fish and curse like a sailor. She’d have to be willing to mix a beer with her tequila,” she jokes, holding up her glass. “She’d have to be alright with how fast I drive.” 

Lightning’s stomach won’t stop turning. She reaches over, clinks her drink against Doc’s, still covering her chest with her but less diligently, in case something slips out. “I hear you,” she says, mouth dry.. “To fun women who drink hard and drive fast.” 

Doc’s expression wavers before it’s a mask again, and Lightning feels like this might be the first day of the rest of her life. 


	30. ridin' high

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mentions of past salqueen, and pining.

Doc can’t stop smiling. 

It’s embarrassing. Her cheeks hurt. She’s taken to pressing her hand over the lower half of her face to hide the wide, reflexive flash of her teeth when she’s in public. People will think something’s _wrong, _if they catch her smiling all the goddamned time. Or, they’ll thing something’s changed. And then they might start digging, and then they might find out about the girl back home in her bed, and they can’t know about that. It’s something just for her, and her alone. 

Doc grins wild and reckless every time she thinks of her, which is every second, all the goddamned time. This secret, this miracle. Tangled up in her sheets, her lipstick on her pillow, her hair in a blonde tangle clinging to the drain of her shower. Lightning McQueen, who showed up, melted the ice around her heart, crawled under her skin and wouldn’t leave. 

Doc has loved her forever. Since she saw her park shy of the finish line, climb out of the rollcage, and run across the track to Strip’s smoking car. Since she learned her hair smells like strawberries, and her sweat smells like high school gym class and spice. Since Lightning told her over a bottle of red wine _I’ve tried to fuck guys, but I never even get past kissing, really. I hate the stubble. I hate the way they touch me, so. Yeah. I stopped trying. Pussy is where it’s at, you feel me? _She’s loved her since she decided and accepted that even if Lightning was a lesbian, she wasn’t the type to ever look twice at an old butch women in beta up Levi’s and tucked in flannel. And that was fine, really. It was easy, Loving Lightning, even if Doc knew it would never go anywhere. 

But one day, Lightning showed up crying on her door-step, mascara trails down her cheeks, hair up in a loose, messy bun. She threw her arms around Doc’s waist, rubbed her face into her button up, and said, _I had to break up with Sally. I had to because—because she thinks m’too obsessed with you. And she’s right. _

Doc hadn’t known what to do, then. What to make of it. She assumed Lightning was confused, that her hero-worship had her twisted up, that it would go _away _the second they talked about the realities. That Doc was over thirty years her senior, for one. That Lightning was a famous NASCAR driver and it would look terrible if she was too close with her crew chief, for another. 

But it didn’t go away. Lightning stayed, and she begged, and she smoothed her hands up Doc’s back so slowly, so sweetly, while she laid her head on her shoulder and said _you can shove me off, you can make me leave. I won’t try anything, promise. I just. Just want to be close to you. Just want to be in your arms. _

Doc was weak, and Lightning was irresistible, so eventually she caved. She kissed her hair, her neck. She traced the veins in her wrist and told her, _I don’t know what to do with how bad I want you,_ thinking all the while, _she’ll break you heart. It’ll feel so good, at first, to touch her, but you’ll never _have_ her. She’ll figure it out and leave you so quick. _

Lightning kissed her, murmured, _put it here. Put it in my mouth. Kiss me. _And she had. She didn’t know how to do anything else, even if it was all going to shatter her, in the end. 

But that was months ago, and Lightning’s still in her bed. She’s still leaving make up on her pillow, hair in he drain. She still kisses Doc so sweet and hungry, still falls apart around her fingers, under her tongue. She still spoons her through the night, pressing sleepy kisses to the drawn-tight skin over her spine as the dawn creeps in through the window. She still tells her she loves her so many times a day Doc loses count, just like she loses herself in the dark, rick blue of her eyes. 

So, Doc’s gotten fucking complacent, despite every effort not to. Doc grins wild and reckless every time she thinks of her, which is every second, all the goddamned time. Her girl, tangled in her sheets, waiting for that smile to be pressed into the ditch of her elbow, the speed of her pulse, the tender inside of her thigh. 


	31. playboy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is riffing on the Drabble I wrote where McQueen posed for playboy, and finds the issue at Doc's house.

Lightning is taking so fucking long to use the bathroom, Doc is staring to worry she fell in and drowned or something. 

Right before she goes to find her, Lightning emerges, holding something rolled up in her hand like a newspaper for swatting, eyes wide and positively _feral. _Doc’s mouth goes dry, but she still manages to keep her face from belying her terror. “I was beginning to worry you’d gotten lost,” she says. 

“So,” Lightning says, smacking her spread-wide palm with whatever magazine she has in her hand. “I’d like to know, did you have a _subscription_ to this or did you buy it _just_ because you thought I was pretty? And, if it’s the latter, was it before or _after_ you knew me?” 

Doc wishes she could play dumb, but there are limits to her stoicism. She _knows_ what Lightning is referring to, she knows and she’s been _meaning_ to get rid of it, in case something like this ever happens. She narrows her eyes, pressing her lips together. “What in the hell are you doing snooping in my bedroom?” 

“Better question,” Lightning says, grinning, cocking her head. “Why do you have my _Playboy_ issue in your bedroom?” 

Doc flattens her mouth, “I wanted to read the article,” she says, which honestly sounds worse than it is. “I–you were the first woman in NASCARto make headlines in years. I was curious, obviously.” 

Lightning fake pouts. “My tits had nothing to do with it?” 

Feeling trapped, Doc forces out, “Kid, what do you want me to say?” 

“Just–The truth, I guess,” Lightning says then, wavering a bit, like this is the first time she’s chanced something honest in this whole conversation. “I feel like your standards are high, if you–if you thought I was hot, before you knew me–I’d want to know. I’d be proud.” She shrugs, and Doc watches the bunch and gather of her shoulders before they drop. 

“Well. Yeah. You were easy on the eyes,” she mumbles. “That was before I realized what a fucking pain in the ass you are, though.” 

Lightning beams, tossing the magazine at Doc so sudden she only catches it reflexively, thumb spread over Lightning’s flat, airbrushed, pixelated stomach. 

“Fine, I’ll take it,” she says, winking. 


	32. I love Paris

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realllyyy want to continue this one too tbh. Also it won't make sense if you've suffered through the train wreck that's cars 2.

Lightning nearly gets _blown up_ in London, and this is _after_ more than half her competitors end up dog-piled in a smoking heap in Italy and and her best friend narrowly escapes getting murdered by _corporate oil moguls turned spies. _

_Literally_ all she wants in life is to get back to Radiator Springs, and crawl into her bed next to Doc, who was smart enough to opt out of the tri-city Grand Prix. _Baby, you lost me at Japan, _she’d said, shaking her head. _M’too old for this one. Take Mater. _

And that was how she ended up here. Honestly, Lightning wishes she’d stayed home, too. Doc had the right idea. 

“I cannot fucking wait to see you,” she mumbles on her last phone call before she boards at Heathrow. “I’m not cut out for espionage. Also, Mater just came out of a gift shop wearing a union jack cape. M’gonna kill him, except I can’t because he recently saved my life from a psychotic oil tycoon, so.” 

Doc inhales sharply, and it crackles with static, making Lightning ache with how bad she misses her. “Don’t say that. I don’t like thinking about your life in _Mater’s_ hands.” 

“Does that mean you miss me too?” Lightning asks, pulling on her sweatshirt strings. She’s a mess right now, in worn out Juicy velour track pants and a stained hoodie, her hair up in a bun and hidden in a beanie, no make up on at all, not even her trademark lipstick. Not a single person has even _recognized_ her here. It’s weird, and sort of nice. 

“Yeah, s’not the same without you around. Quiet. The toilet paper gets replaced so fast, there’s no empty milk cartons in the fridge…” 

“Stop!” Lightning laughs. “You _do_ miss me.” 

“So much I can’t sleep. Gonna be so nice to have you in my arms again, princess,” she murmurs, the warmth of it a nearly palpable thing, even across the pond. 

Lightning sighs, and kisses her iphone. No one is watching for once, so she doesn’t even feel stupid. “See you in like, twelve hours.” 

But apparently, Lightning McQueen’s bad luck streak isn’t over because she _doesn’t_ see Doc in twelve hours. Instead, there’s a fucking freak rainstorm and her plane has to emergency land at Charles de Gaulle. There, she’s delayed _so fucking long_ she decides to get a goddamned _hotel_ in Paris for the night because she might be a better person than she was a few years ago but she’s not a heathen and she _will not sleep_ in an airport. Even a French airport. 

Mater tries to cheer her up on the cab ride to their hotel, pointing out landmarks and going on and on about how excited he is to try a baguette. She tunes him out. She’s too exhausted to even _cry properly, _all she can do is frantically text Doc, throat thick, eyes stinging as rain pelts the windows of the car. 

She wakes up still wine-drunk from the cheap, awful bottle of red she picked up at the corner store last night. Turns out even in Paris you can buy shitty wine, if you’re lowballing enough. She’s twisted up in white hotel sheets, too tired and sad and dizzy to even _care_ she’s supposedly in the most beautiful city in the world. The sun is out now apparently, and it burns her eyes as she sits up and blinks, head pounding. Someone is knocking at the door. “No maid!” she yells. Then, because she doesn’t know French but knows distantly she’s not supposed to be speaking english, “Nein maid!” 

“How about jet-lagged old ladies?” a gruff voice rasps from the other side. 

Her heart leaps. 

She’s wearing the same gross clothes from Heathrow yesterday, but she doesn’t care. She stumbles out of bed and throws the door open, eyes wide and disbelieving as they fall upon the impossible. 

Doc is standing there with a rolling suitcase. Her eyes have heavy bags under them and she looks a little more ruffled than she usually does, like she slept on her hair and forgot to fix it, but she’s _there. _Tall and straight-backed and handsome as fucking ever, one silver brow raised above piercing ice blue. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” she mumbles, reaching out and dragging a dumbfounded Lightning into her chest, kissing her hair. “Even prettier than I remember.” 

Lightning doesn’t know when she started crying, but it’s coming out of her like the rain fell from the sky last night, fierce and torrential, getting all over Doc’s button up, staining it in vast swaths of wet. “I look _terrible_ right now, I’m—how did you get here? Am I dreaming? Am I drunk? I have no lipstick.” she wails. 

Doc, who is old but not weak, _never _weak, hikes Lightning up by her thighs and carries her back to bed. Lightning hangs there around her neck like a particularly pitiful koala. “You look beautiful. I flew, came as soon as I heard you were delayed. I don’t think so. Probably. And thank god, means I can kiss you without it getting all over me,” Doc patiently answers, before she tips Lightning back into the hotel pillow and presses their mouths together, hard and deep. Lightning melts into it for a moment before she has to cry harder. 

Doc is undeterred. She kisses her neck, her clavicles. She pushes one of her arms up and kisses down the tricep from the elbow to her pit, and then she kisses over her stomach, to her hip points, and back up to her sternum. “I’ve been worried sick ever since you left for Japan,” she confesses, voice coming out in a mumble against Lightning’s throat. “And everyone kept crashing and I kept thinking, m’just gonna board a plane, m’just gonna go find her and march up to her and beg her not to race, but you kept telling me everything was fine and—fuck. Wish I’d been here sooner. But m’here now.” 

Lightning sniffles, hands all over Doc in broad, disbelieving strokes. She _knew _she needed her, she needed her _so bad, _but now that she’s here she can hardly believe how good it feels. What a huge, aching exhale. She’s finally _home, _even if she’s in Paris. “I—I didn’t want to push you. You said you didn’t want to do any international travel this time around, so it seemed…I dunno. Selfish, I guess, to beg you to come out here on some stupid Eurotrip with me because of a few crashes.” 

“Well,” Doc says, nuzzling into her jaw, teeth scraping against the edge of it hungrily. “I happen to love Paris.” 

“You’ve never been here before,” Lightning reminds her, grinning through her tears.

Doc shrugs. “My baby girl is here, so it’s the best damned city in the world, as far as I’m concerned. We don’t have tickets back home until Saturday, so why don’t you show me around?” 

Lightning’s grin widens so hard it makes her cheeks ache, heart swelling so much she feels like her chest could rupture, her ribs cracking one by one. “Alright. But first, let me slip into something more comfortable,” she jokes as she wiggles out of her terrible Juicy pants. 

Doc bites her arm. “See? Fucking love Paris.” 


	33. car wash

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tags: pining, sally as an ex, age angst, flirting, lightning being an absolute MENACE.

She’s wearing too-tight gym shorts and a white muscle tank so you can see her ribcage through the cut-out wet holes, and you hate being able to witness skin you’re not allowed to touch, so you fish one of your flannels out of the mess of laundry in the back of your truck and toss it to her. “Put this on,” you scold, crossing your arms sternly. “You’re gonna catch cold.” 

“It’s not cold,” she gripes, but she loves wearing your clothes for some cruel fucking reason so she shoulders into the thing, sipping her beer. “God_damn_Doc, your truck is a mess.” 

It _is_ a mess. You’ve been living out of it for the last week since your house had to be fumigated, sleeping in a room at the Cozy Cone and keeping everything else stuffed into your garage or the flatbed. Still, it seems ridiculous for Lightning to give you a hard time for living messy out of _necessity_ when she does the same out of _choice. “_Hey,” you say, uncapping your water bottle and chucking some of it at her, watching her shriek and dart out of the way. “That’s big talk coming from a girl who doesn’t shower after practice unless I make her,” you say.

“Lemme wash it for you,” she says coyly then, flipping her hair. Lightning does this _thing, _lately, since the two of you started rooming side by side at the Cone. This thing where she flirts with you, tries to get a rise out of you by showing off her tits and sweet-talking and curling her split ends around her fingers like you being butch makes your tastes akin with some sloppy desperate man. She doesn’t know you’ve loved her for longer than you’ve known her, that she doesn’t have to seduce you, or pretend to seduce you, or whatever stupid thing she’s doing for attention. She doesn’t know you love her just as much in fuzzy socks and an oversized hoodie with no make up, that you love her no matter what. 

“Go for it,” you tell her before finishing off your beer, crushing the can in your palm punishingly. “She could sure use it.” 

You think she’s gonna drop it, but actually she takes the suggestion to heart, rooting around the motel lot of the Cone until she finds a hose, which she holds over her head triumphantly. “Fuck yeah,” she says. “Have soap?” 

“Ask your ex girlfriend for some,” you offer, thinking that will _for sure_ stop her in her tracks, but she just shrugs and straight up _does_ it, finds Sally at the receptionists desk and comes back with some dishsoap and a sponge. She and Sally appear to be on inarguably good terms, not even tense or anything, and that sort of blows your mind. These young girls just do shit like this, fuck and forgive and forget, while you sit on the sidelines, heart broken over someone you’ll never even touch. It’s maddening, being too old for frivolity. 

“Lemme at that dirty car,” she quips, tying her hair up and kicking off her shoes. And there she stands, barefoot in front of _your Cone_ wearing _your shirt_ and no bra, firing up the hose. “Shit, it’s still warm from lying out in the sun,” she exclaims, letting it cascade over her head, soaking her tank top, your flannel, the whole of her dirty blonde ponytail. “Shower time,” she adds, grinning at you. 

“What, you want me to get a camera? Are you trying to be a calendar girl or something? Should I call Harv up and tell him you finally agreed—“ 

“Fuck Harv,” she says, turning the hose on you, making you yelp before she dissolves into giggles, pulling the stream back just before it lands on you. You can see her hard nipples through the thin cotton, water glistening on her throat, and something in your chest feels like its rupturing. “You’re my manager now.” And she flips her hair before she lathers up the sponge and starts to scrub down the hood of your truck. “M’not a calendar girl, it’s a private show.” 

And you don’t know what to say to that, so you just pop the tab on another beer, and brace yourself. 


	34. baking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just fluff!!!

Lightning has flour _all over. _It’s on her shirt, dusted on rosy skin up to her elbows, clinging to her blonde hair. Doc comes over, crosses her arms, and pretends to observe the baking process. Really, she’s just getting an eyeful of the prettiest girl she knows, (_her_ girl, somehow, still the craziest thing that’s ever happened to her,) all messy and gorgeous in her kitchen. 

It’s still so stunning to Doc, that she gets to _observe_ her in real time, let alone, touch her, kiss her, take her to bed, wake up next to her. It’s been months, but still, it hasn’t sunk in. Maybe it’s because this is her first Christmas in over a _decade_ she’s not spending alone. Decorating a tree, listening to Perry Como, baking sugar cookies…they all feel so _different, _and magical somehow, when Lightning is the one demanding they do them, instead of some remote corporate or religious or seasonal pressure. Doc is in love, and that changes everything. 

“Looks like you’ve managed to get it everywhere but the baking sheet,” she says, reaching for Lightning’s ass in her yoga pants and gently pinching it. 

She yelps, spinning on socked feet to make an affronted face at Doc. It fails, and she just ends up grinning. “That’s because the dough’s in the fridge. It’s gotta harden up a little before I use the cookie cutters.” she explains, holding up a reindeer shape. “You wanna help?” 

“I want a kiss,” Doc says, grabbing a fistful of Lighting’s shirt and pulling her close. “Do you have—is that _butter, _in your bra?” 

Lightning looks down, giving herself a very cute double chin as she pulls her shirt out and peers down it. “Yeah, looks like it.” Then she looks up, eyes big and guilty and blue. “I’ll clean up the kitchen, I promise.” 

“You’d better,” Doc murrmurs, low and hot into Lightning’s ear. 


	35. ice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lightning and Doc go skating. CW for pining.

“I hate not being _good_ at things,” Lightning complains from the snowdrift she’s just deposited herself into like a grumpy sack of potatoes. Her cheeks are flushed and her black beanie is askew and her hair is all over the place, pale cornsilk against the dirty white snow. Still, as far as Doc’s concerned, she’s the prettiest thing in this entire ice rink, whetheror not she can stay upright.

Doc skates over methodically, stopping herself between the messy splay of Lightning’s knees. “You’re not _bad_ at it, you just have to practice, and slow down. If you’re not going so fucking fast you won’t fall so hard,” she explains, offering a hand for Lightning to take. 

Lightning does, gloves wet and soggy from how many times she’s hit the ice. Doc gingerly pulls her up onto the blades of her skates, smiling at the way she’s all splay-footed and awkward, tottering there unsteadily. “Ok, _yeah, _but I shouldn’t be falling at all. You say it like it’s inevitable.” 

“Kid, it_ is_ inevitable, you’re just learning,” Doc explains, laying a hand on Lightning’s waist to keep her put. She winces as she does it, because she tries not to touch Lightning too much. It makes her feel crazy, makes her palms burn with impossibility. 

Lightning doesn’t seem to mind, or notice. In fact she grips onto Doc’s wool jacket, holding onto her all white knuckled like a life-line. “Ok, then can you like, _help me? _I’m gonna have bruises all over my ass. I don’t want to fall again, if I start to slip just, I dunno. Sweep me off my feet. Throw me over your shoulder. ” 

“It’s easier if you’re _not_ holding onto someone else,” Doc half-lies, disentangling herself from Lightning’s grip. 

“Ok, well, hold my hand then,” Lightning asks, lacing their fingers. “Keep me from going too fast and wiping out again.” 

“Fine,” Doc mumbles, reaching over with her free-hand to adjust Lightning’s hat, her mussed hair. “She tucks a few flyaway wisps behind her ear, not able to _stop_ touching now that she’s gotten the go-ahead. That’s the _thing_ about Lightning. Best not to get a single taste, because otherwise it’s all Doc wants, all the time, and she can’t feel that way about someone she’s supposed to be _mentoring. _ “But don’t pull me down with you, ok?” 

“Promise,” Lightning says, tilting into Doc’s touch like she always _does, _confusing and dizzying. “Guess you’re training me in just about everything, huh? Dirt racing. Not being a bitch. Ice skating.” 

Doc starts to push ahead, gingerly pulling Lightning along, risking a glance at her over her own shoulder. “Yeah, suppose so. You gonna pay me for these lessons, too?” 

Lightning laughs messily, the force of it sending her off balance so she almost tips over, and this time, Doc catches her before she catapults into the nearest ice embankment. Her hat is messed up again, and her mouth is open, and she’s got red spots of color on her cheeks to math her smeared lipstick. And still, she’s the prettiest thing in this entire ice rink, _whether _or not she can stay upright.


	36. snowed in

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for mommy kink!!!

Lightning’s never seen so much snow in her _life. _She didn’t even know it _could_snow so much in the desert, she thought it would just be enough to dust the tops of the cactuses and melt by midday, but it’s _piled_ up outside, enough so they can’t even really open the door to dig Doc’s car out. 

“Oh my god. It’s like an honest to god _snow_ day,” Lightning says, standing at the kitchen window watching _more_ come down, glad she’s inside, toasty in her robe and slippers. “M’not sure why but it makes me feel like a little kid. I haven’t seen this much snow since I left the midwest.” 

“What did you do on your snow days? Bet you were a wild child. Bet you sledded and skated and caught cold and worried your mother sick,” Doc murmurs, hooking her arm around Lightning’s waist and pulling her close. Lightning shivers, hiding her face in Doc’s shoulder and neck junction. She always feels weird and tingly when Doc asks her about her childhood, and telling her about it makes her feel safe, soft, warm.

It’s the sort of stuff that’s evolved into Lightning calling her _mommy_ outside the bedroom. Sometimes it’s a sex thing, definitely, but other times it’s_ not_. It’s a feeling taken care of thing, a letting _go_ thing. Trusting that Doc’s _got_ her and she doesn’t have to worry about races or press tours or interviews or photoshoots and paying journalists off to not out her…she can just snuggle up to Doc and let her brush out her hair, braid it into pigtails, call her pretty. And if they fuck after that, _fantastic. _If not, that’s ok too. Maybe it’s weird, but it works for them, so Lightning doesn’t _care. _

_“_No, I was actually more of a stay inside and drink cocoa sort of kid? Maybe some snow angels, but I was never much for winter sports. Too cold out there.” 

“Really? _You?_ Cocoa and snow angels? Damn,” Doc murmurs, nuzzling into Lightning’s dirty hair and inhaling as the flurries pelt the window. “I pictured you whipping down a hill on one of those saucer type sleds that kids die on every year.” 

“Nope,” Lightning purrs, rolling up into the balls of her feet to kiss the corner of Doc’s smirking mouth. “You don’t have to worry, mommy. I just wanna stay home with you.” 

Doc goes very still before she sighs, pushing Lightning away at arm’s length to look at her with a mixture of amusement and awe, like she thinks she’d goddamned lucky, like she _loves_ taking care of Lightning, loves when she trusts her enough to hand over the reins, and it makes Lightning’s insides squirm. “Yeah? You want me to make you some cocoa?” 

“Yeah. With marshmallows,” Lightning tells her, leaning in and kissing Doc square and brief and chaste on the mouth, just enough to tease her. “Pretty please.” 

“You got it, babygirl,” Doc murmurs, messing up her hair with a sweet, rough hand. 


End file.
